How Not to Design a Poster: Seventy Five

I am particularly passionate about music remixes and remix artists, so when we were assigned to create an advertisement poster for an event of our choosing, I immediately chose to advertise the recent release of Seventy Five, a remix album I personally enjoy. 

During the creation of my poster, I realized that choosing to advertise a community-driven project like Seventy Five had the advantage of having readily available artistic resources like the album cover and banner, which I choose to incorporate into my poster design to provide some much needed color as well as contrast to the comparatively mute body of the poster. As for the body itself, I firstly applied a slight tilt to all of the elements and left-aligned the poster information to avoid centering everything. Additionally, I choose to use muted colors and a sans-serif font, Oswald, for the body to keep the information easy on the eyes. Finally, I took some creative license to make the body a bit more visually interesting by applying a slight drop shadow to all elements in the poster, and using a decorative font, Black Ops 1, to ensure the aesthetic of the headline was consistent with that of the “75” in the album cover. 

While I still stand by many of these design decisions, there are a few that I have grown to dislike. For example, while incorporating the album art into the poster proved to be convenient, I now realized that any and all semiotics that could be derived from my poster are actually coming from the album art rather than my own design choices, not to mention how my over-reliance on the vibrancy of the art ruined any semblance of a focal point and eye-flow that the poster might have had otherwise. I also feel I could have done a better job with both my font choice for the headline and my choice of wording for the call-to-arms, as while I attempted to match the aesthetic and message of the album cover, my choices ended up feeling rather tacky in hindsight. 

Looking back, my single greatest takeaway from this project is just how difficult it is to design a graphic that not only looks good, but simultaneously conveys a message as clearly as possible. Comparing what I did right to what I did wrong, it is clear that I could have avoided many of these mistakes by not relying so heavily on pre-existing artistic assets to convey the poster’s message, and instead taking the time to better incorporate the art into the overall poster design.