Have You Ever Wondered About What Can Kill You?

My poster was for the Death by Natural Causes Exhibit at the Houston Museum of Natural Science. I chose to make a poster for that exhibit because it gave me an opportunity to play with a wide range of potential symbols for death and its causes.

I think the symbols I chose ended up working well. They aren't overused, like a gravestone or coffin, and they're eye-catching.

One of my main concerns when designing the poster was the focal point and eye flow. I think my focal point is clear, and it is one of the best parts of my work.

However, the rest of the composition was a lot more difficult to figure out. I was happy with the placement of my title and my spider, so my struggle came with placing my text. My concerns were empty space and balance. For instance, when I put my copy to the right of the poster, there was too much trapped negative space between my text and the spider and it was right heavy.

Putting my copy in the middle of the page made it so that my poster is balanced and doesn't have any trapped negative space, but I still think I might have been able to improve its positioning. My title and spider have a good eye flow, following the rule of thirds, but my copy doesn't follow that rule.

I have my spider pointing towards my copy, so I do have an attempt at creating eye flow between my title and copy. However, I'm not convinced that the eye flow as natural as it can be.

For instance, my eyes flit from my title to the spider to the copy, and that eye motion requires a back and forth motion across the page. It would have been interesting to create a more fluid eye motion, maybe a circular pattern, around the page, but at least there is a clear path that the eyes are supposed to follow.

For me, one of the hardest parts of designing the poster was the copy. I wanted to describe the exhibit and how to purchase it. However, I had to realize that giving all the information isn't the purpose of the poster. The purpose of the poster is to grab people's attention and get them to want to learn more about the exhibit on their own.

The idea that people are only going to spend a few seconds looking at the poster was something that I hadn't considered when first designing my poster, so I had a good amount of text on it. I think that my final use of copy is much better now though, since I got the feedback on how to limit it, and in the future, I will continue to have a lot less copy on my posters.

My experience with coming up with the right copy for my poster illustrates the difference between being a content producer and a content consumer. When reading posters in the past, I haven't liked ones with too much text, but when I was first designing my poster, it was like I completely forgot that experience.

The content creator will always have certain design ideas that will make sense from the creator's perspective because they'll know what they're trying to get across. However, this is where focusing on the audience is really important. The content creator has to encode their intentions for their audience and their audience's circumstances and not just do what makes sense to them.