Today's Thoughts - Poster Design

I have just over a week left until my deadline so I would like to produce a quick poster to promote the even. I had a look at a few poster campaigns/branding online just so I could get a general idea of what my poster should include:

image sources: (1) (2) (3) (4) (5) (6) (7) (8) (9) (10)

As you can see, the design of the main product had been carried across to all of the other items within the campaign. This means that I should somehow incorporate my front book cover design onto my poster to create a connection between the two products. However, this is an advertisement for the Oxford Literary Festival and therefore I should be careful as it could look like I'm advertising the book instead.

To overcome this I could always just include a segment of the cover illustration such as just including the swirls that are featured on there and the book, because their sole existing poster that I managed to find in my local newspaper had included books within their design. 

This is the easiest option to go by; I could either just use what I already have or simply adapt it slightly to fit on the poster. 

I flicked through my existing designs to see if I could get some sort of inspiration from them as I had originally thought to incorporate their designs on a series of posters. This has it's advantages and disadvantages.

Advantages:

• The poster would be linked to my designs
• Could be easily done - don't have to design anything else 

Disadvantages:

• The designs might not be able to size up that big and could become pixelated
• Their format might not necessarily fit on the portrait poster (as they are more square)

There is one design in particular I really thought would be suitable for a poster was my quote from "The Fault in Our Stars":

It's very simple and there isn't an excessive amount of decorative, which would be good for a poster. However, the background is very dark which would increase printing costs and it doesn't fit in with my book cover design. If I did do a poster in this style, people probably wouldn't realise it's connection to my book as the cover is very different to it. 

As I'm still stuck I uploaded all of my designs onto Facebook and asked my friends to "like" which designs that they thought would be ideal for a poster. Below I have written out my results instead of using screenshots to preserve their privacy.

6 likes

1 like

12 likes

17 likes

8 likes

5 likes

It seems that the Lord of the Rings design is the most popular and that could be because it's easily recognisable and everyone - or most people - know of that quote. This could be an advantage for my poster design because it would mean that other people would recognise it and then wander what it's about.

On the other hand, this design might not be suitable because then the viewer might think that the exhibition is about Lord of the Rings rather than a literary festival unless I make it very clear on what it's about. There's also that possibility that it'll be pixelated at a scale larger than A3 which applies to all of the designs I have produced.

Final Thoughts...

I'm still a bit lost on what to do but I think that the best idea would be to carry some aspects from my book cover across to the poster as it'll be stronger as a campaign and integrate it with my "Fault in Our Stars" piece. This is because I find the techniques used in it quite interesting.

To quickly summarise, I'll be using the same kind of illustrations for my book cover but make the background black and everything else white, and possibly use the same type style I had in my stars piece. 

Learning Outcomes:

[5] Developed skills of independent study, resource utilisation, problem-solving and decision-taking.

[6] Developed skills of critical thinking, analysis and evaluation.