DES101 Poster 1 Process

The lamp once out

Cool stars enter

The window frame.

- Natsume Soseki

Poster 1 for the first assignment in Design 101 is to create a 40 x 40 poster using geometric shapes and black and white colours. Since I was not ultimately used to this type of design, I had a difficult time creating something that looked simple - including the requirements - yet delivers the haiku that I had chosen.

I had created concept posters during Design 101 tutorials and also in my own time at the design studio. However, after lockdown occurred and everyone had to be in quarantine, I realised that I could not further work on the poster design that I had left at the design studio. Also, since it was unfinished, I didn't take any photo of the concept that was on paper. Since I had limited art supplies at home to create a poster design, I decided to design different ideas using digital tools before I create the final poster itself.

Based on the haiku that I chose, I first started with literally delivering the imagery that was created from the poem. Using the keywords from the poem, I created those objects with geometric shapes: the lamp, stars, and the window frame.

After I had completed this design, I realised that the small circles that were meant to represent the stars resembled snow more than stars, so I decided to adjust the poster slightly.

I altered the stars in the night sky by changing the circles into square shapes representing the pointy shapes when looking at stars and decided to create a moon to represent the night sky further.

Instead of sticking to this idea, however, I decided to quickly sketch out more variety of designs that I could explore for the poster.

These are more concepts that I have explored for the final design. Since grey colours are hard to enact with just markers, I decided to use only the colour black and white. While I was looking for inspirations online, I came across these designs on Pinterest.

This is a sketch using geometric shapes drawn by Anderson Carman (original blog: http://thisiskindasketchy.blogspot.com/2014/06/2d-design.html)

I much liked the use of lines which allowed certain areas to look grey and also using not just 2D shapes but altering the lines to look 3D. From this, I have developed a rough idea for the final design of my poster.

When talking about the lamp and window frame, it must mean that it is set in a particular room. The previous concepts have shown the view from inside the room. So I decided to change the view to the outside as a third-person view. By changing the view-point, it allowed me to create an entirely different look from previous posters and also give a sort of illusion with the lines. I wanted to incorporate the use of lines like the inspiration previously, so after drawing the cube for the room, I filled in the blank area with lines. The filled-in lines allowed more attention to the room area where it is blank compared to the outside space.

The final look of the poster:

I thought using a different width of the line on the circle in the middle and adding a block of black to the other floor area gave more attention and salience to the white space of the room.

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