Studio Brief 01 - Leeds Public Spaces - Development

Creating Textures

To make the design original I made my own textures that are the basis of the design. The DIY punk aesthetic needs to be an integral part of the design for this poster so I thought the most effective way of doing so was creating my own textures/assets. To do this I photographed cut out paper, scribbled marker pen and safety pins I was then able to take that images into photoshop, cut it out so that I could then finally add the image into illustrator where then I was able to turn it into a vector by image tracing it. I found this method very effective and it gave me the look that I wanted to achieve, once I had these textures I was able to combine or manipulate them different ways to get different looks. 

I decided to mainly concentrate on my second idea which incorporated the large numbers and had a good focus on the celebratory part of the event. the reason I deiced to take this idea further is because I felt that it was it take elements of the traditional punk style and more contemporary elements which help to tie it into my style of design currently. 

This is my first attempt at putting together the poster from the sketch that I did, I was able to use the textures to give it that punk look which I feel it does very well. All the lettering has been manually set so that it gets the ransom note style which meant that I was able to play around with different typefaces and combine them together, for the main body text I used Arial black which worked well as it can be stretched in different ways to change the style of each character meaning that no two letter will be the same which fit in with the punk style. 

Once I had all of the content created I was really able to experiment with different layout and  I was also able to change around the textures to see if I could achieve different looks and get to the best result possible. I was pleased with the use of the large numbers so i wanted to work around this and find the best outcome. 

It was difficult to try and find the balance as the design is very heavy and bold so figuring out what goes where was very important part of this process. It was also difficult to tell which designs would work better as they will look different with colour, it was at this point i started thinking about the use of colour and how I could take the punk aesthetic further and try and modernise the style a little. 

I was very curious of asking for feedback on my designs as I wanted to make sure that I was producing the poster well enough to celebrate the event. With this design I had tried to take what I had liked about the previous two and merge them into one as I felt they both had good qualities. Th first thing i thought about was scale, my feedback suggested that I think about how prominent the band names are in terms of relevance as it felt like the smaller bands where taking up too much space, so I have tired to make it more proportional. The other part that I have changed is the celebratory part with was too small, it is now a lot bigger and helps to give the message of the poster better. 

  
I also wanted to experiment with a totally different style using the assets and textures that I have created for the other posters. The idea behind the poster on the left was to get the positive negative effect that would have been achievable to by exposing letters on to paper, I felt that it gave it a different feel as everything is a little more chaotic which does help to fit the punk vibe. The poster to the left I have just tired to highlight the key information however I feel that the bottom makes it seem like a different poster as it is so bold it is too contrasty. 

From all of my designs I have been able take what I thought was was the most appropriate response. Th use of large type helps to show the date that it is celebrating, the information then sit nicely between the header and the footer, which are the second most prominent part of the design. I was then able to scale the band names in order of who was playing (importance) which do not distract from the rest of the information. Thinking about colour is the next stage, I need to decide how this poster will be present as black and white is very dull and does not fit the punk style. 

By adding colour I was able bring the poster to life, the use of colour is simple. As am only planning on producing 1 colour screen print this will allow me to use the paper as a means of adding more colour. I felt that it would be easier to experiment with colour while screen printing however I have come up with a few different colour combination that would fit the punk style. For example the top left is inspired by Sex Pistols album Never Mind The Buzzcocks. Traditionally punk posters will only use black ink as it is cost effective and easy to reproduce, but i thought that this could be changed as it is a lot easier to reproduce these colours now, so it would give the punk poster a more of a contemporary style. 

The next stage for me is to expose my design ready for screen printing. This will be a straight forward process as I only require one layer, I will also be getting a number of different stocks in a few bright colours that will allow me to experiment with the different colour ideas.