Taking Back The Stolen
April 2021, Class Project using Illustrator, Figma, Indesign, and Adobe Capture︎Overview: Taking Back the Stolen is a series of three typographic posters done as a typography project to promote a fictional exhibition of significant social movement at the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center in Cincinnati. The posters are designed to stay true to the grass roots nature and power of these three movements while subtly maintaining traditional typographic fundamentals.
︎Objectives:
- Research, analyze, and identify key issues within a visual communication problem
- Develop a visual system implemented across three posters
- Communicate messages and ideas visually through content hierarchies.
︎Physical Sketchs: In order to brainstorm for the project three physical sketches were created in the span of one hour with readily available materials.
︎Big Idea Brainstorming: A venn diagram was constructed in order to visualize the common threads that run through each event as a way to create a title and big idea.
Top Three Big Ideas:
1. Taking Back The Stolen
2. United for Change
3. A Global Call
︎Digital Sketches: The first round of digital sketches focused primarily on experimentation. While a basis for the rest of the project, these ideations were dropped as they focused too little on the typography and had little room to expand.
︎Branching Paths: Behind these three social movements is a great deal of pain, struggle, and loss. In order to explore how to design for such powerful subject matter further development for the project was split in two.
︎Path One: While this series offers an amount of visual interest in their handling of form and type, their lack of connection to the subject became immediately clear as a severe handicap.
︎Path Two: Immediately the emotional impact of the second path feels more fitting, giving the viewer an immediate idea of the tone of the exhibition. However, the overall effect of the poster fits a rock concert more than a museum exhibition.
︎Final Design: While splitting into two approaches was crucial to explore different outcomes, only through rejoining them and understanding their advantages was a final concept decided upon. The distressed, hand crafted effects from path two remained, but were instead applied to exact divisions of space. Colors were chosen to make each poster specific to its subject while compositional elements were shifted around to create variety between the variants. The series remains distanced from its emotional core, but still retains a meaningful relation to the subject matter.