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Brief

To create an A4 poster (21cm x 29.7cm at 300dpi) for this semesters Drama Production: The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee

You need to complete the whole design process and place in your visual diary:

• Research (Research this play and posters for comedy plays. Find imagery that you may be able to use for inspiration for your own poster)

• Concepts (Draw three concepts with annotations – where is everything going to be laid out on your poster – Make sure you use all the information)

• Development (take shots of your poster on the computer as you work on it in Photoshop or Illustrator)

• Solution (Print off your final poster on A4 paper to hand in to me and one to stick into your visual diary. Save your file as a .psd or .ai file and upload on Google Classroom)

• Evaluation (Discuss your poster in terms of how you utilised the elements and principles of design. What symbolism did you use and why? What could be improved or what would you do differently next time? Why?)

Concepts

Development

Evaluation

The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee: The Musical

In this task, the graphic design classes were assigned to design a poster for Dickson's drama class' musical, The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee. This was to be treated as a client brief assignment, where a drama class representative came and spoke to each class about basic specifications. As this is an informative poster, things that the client has requested be on the poster are the following:

• Information about the show: time, date, place and pricing

• Credits: acknowledging the people who created the musical

• Legal statements: acknowledgements of licenses and suppliers

Additionally, the poster is meant to be A4 and created on either Photoshop or Illustrator. All other design decisions are ultimately up to the graphic design students, though the briefing presentation provided mood boards, preferred colours and reference as possible inspiration.

The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee is a bright, inclusive musical about a group of eclectic sixth graders - this in itself tells a lot about the intended mood. The characters are eclectic because they each present their own stories through their songs, and also want to win for different reasons. This means that the musical puts an emphasis on the unique mix of personalities, and therefore the poster will have to reflect such expressive behaviour - this can be done through noticeable textures and patterns, as well as the symbolism the poster uses. Additionally, because it features a primary school setting, the mood is playful and energetic, which is why the preferred colour palette includes vibrant, solid colours. This means that many primary colours will be in the final design: red, yellow, etc. (because their wavelengths appear prominent - energetic - to the human eye), though yellow is more likely to be used because it's associated with the word 'bee'. In general, a musical poster should assert itself through its symbolism because, in my opinion, a poster should use the most iconic symbols from a musical (eg Phantom Of The Opera's poster has the white mask as its focus).

Above is the final draft for my The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee poster. In terms of the general approach, this poster intends to portray the personalities of the characters, as well as the mood of the musical itself. I believed the best way to do this was to use all the main characters of the musical, because each of them play an equally-important role to the next. To personalise these characters, I gave them the clothes which the actors will be wearing during showtimes (credits to the musical fashion designer and my friend, Emily). Other symbols that I used are the microphone (because the spelling bee), the trophy (because competition) and the bee (because spelling bee, again). All of these object-elements have the point of representing the spelling bee, though there is one other significant element that carries the meaning and mood, and that's style:

A zestful musical about a primary school needs an art style that reflects it. This means the art style should be freeform - as if straight out of a child's imagination. To achieve this, I have used a rough, brush-like texture in this design's lines which the viewer may associate with freehand drawings - like a crayon, or a messy brush - while still having the shapes drawn clean to convey professionalism (I used Medibang Paint Pro to do a few of the drawings). Everything else that contributes to art style are in the elements themselves:

Relating to the icons and art style are the shapes of the design. As aforementioned, I have made the shapes with the rough line quality, but the shapes themselves are clean and refined as to feel deliberate (using correction tools and shape tools). Other than the distinct items (eg a microphone that looks like a microphone), the forms that these shapes were focused on were the characters' body languages. This was to pay attention to detail through telling body gestures, such as Chip (person on the far right) - he self-conscious as he has worries on going through puberty, so I made it so his hands are clasped together - a gesture some people make when they are anxious/worried. Other shapes in this design are simply meant to fill in awkward negative space with their round forms and child-like textures. Overall the shapes were meant to be clean but also quite obvious as to what they are.

An element that closely relates to shape is the typography. The typography in this design was a huge element, in that it took a while to decide on and how it would be the first thing the viewers lay their eyes on because of its size. The general of the typography was to make it playful, quirky and fun - this was done through a mixture of different typefaces (note that they still fit within the art style) to convey the playful behaviour a child's imagination would have. As for incorporating the subtitles and body texts, I used the rule-of-three where I used only two other fonts. In this case, I used Active Regular for the secondary text: a clean brushy typeface with a distinct size and shape (I enjoyed using this), and Baskerville Old Village (or a similar typeface along those lines) for the tertiary, which provided the balance with the sans-serif texts in the primary and secondary fonts. Other than resizing to put the right emphasis on each text, this mixture of typography hopes to bring about a balance to each other through shape and size contrast.

Yet another dominant element is the colour scheme. This design uses a bursting mix of primary colours which hope to reach out in a kind way to the viewer. With yellow as the dominant colour and other vibrant hues complimenting it, this colour scheme is less about connotational meaning and rather being a playful and 'creative' piece. It is also that the colour scheme isn't minimalist: it uses shades and different saturations of each colour to add to the liveliness of the piece - what I intended when setting out to create a poster about a primary school-set musical.

Putting all these elements together is the composition. As aforementioned, this design has a simple up-down direction as well as symmetry for reading ease. Essentially, each element was placed among each other in fair distances - leaving not a lot of space for negative space for the sake of reading ease and making this composition energetic. Thanks to the contrast of colours and shape, I have also separated each group of element by distinctly placing them on a hierarchy (eg the orange at the bottom of the design separates the 'secondary' information from the more important ones). Wrapping this entire design together is the starry-texture, which was a free texture from Medibang Paint Pro to give the design more depth.

As for what I would improve in this design, I would try to refine certain details. The most prominent problem I had was working with the secondary text, especially the text about the bookings, pricing, time, dates, etc. This is because the space between them and the stands were much too small, so I ended up condensing the text by putting each text 'box' into more paragraphs. I managed to deal with this by changing certain texts to be smaller (most notable the matinee part), but in doing so slightly ruined the text hierarchy (the size variation is too much). Other problems that I would fix would be the clarity of the people-shapes (maybe lower the pen size next time) and refine the dashed-lines for the bee trail (it seems a little too rough).

Overall, I am fairly satisfied with the detail and overall design of the poster. I have met all the brief requirements while adding my own art style, and I each design element meets the effect that I have intended: a playful, energetic, satisfying poster.

From your graphic designer, have a nice day.

Teri

Note for UC Creative Competition people: the final design is slightly different to the above for final polishing. This includes edits as suggested by the client (drama organiser) to optimise the design for marketing! :D