Exercise: Poster and flyer

Exercise: Poster and flyer (Graphic Design 1: pg. 116)

You have been asked to design an A3 poster and an accompanying double-sided A6 flyer to promote a singing course run by an organisation called SingOut. They have very little money so want to print these posters on their black and white photocopier. You can use coloured paper if you want.

They have provided the information to include, consider if you need anything more, and the information hierarchy. Critique your work and reflect on your design choices.

I was quite looking forward to the constraints of this exercise and working with a monochrome palette. Online research suggested that images associated with singing are quite gendered and tend to focus on women. They also quite often include microphones, particularly the old square, 1940s type mic.

I was concerned that a female focused poster might limit the audience so wanted to try something else. I sketched a few ideas on the tablet and then started experimenting in Illustrator. I find it much easier with text based work to play on the computer rather than hand sketching, mainly because of the ease that things can be moved around and occasionally happy accidents happen as something might crossover, or be dragged into a place that created an effect I hadn’t anticipated.

I started with two versions that were quite sketch based, I thought if they were going to print them on a photocopier I would play on the handcrafted look. The third version was quite different in that I went for simplicity. I wasn’t sure if it might sit counter to their point about not having to read music but I think the shape of a note is a reasonably well understood symbol. The final version did include a woman’s head as a stylised line drawing and I decided on headline typeface that echoed the old Jazz style posters.

Having printed all four versions I felt the simple grid layout worked best, it was still eye catching but easy to reproduce at low cost. From this one I developed the flyer. It was interesting, and probably not surprising, to note that in moving between the two sizes simply scaling the larger version down did not work.

On the side with the main details it simply made the text too small to read and I was conscious it had gone below the RNIB recommended 12pt. While I was using the same elements they had to be reworked for the design to be able to impart all the necessary information. I like the simplicity of the design and think it would be noticeable, it also photocopied without any problems.