Reflecting History Through Broadway

 

    The poster that I designed was for a class I am currently taking that focuses on the history of the American musical, and on how musicals are a valuable lens through which you can view American society at different points in history. My first idea was to make a poster based on the Playbill design, with the course title or number where the word "Playbill" would normally appear (here's an article showcasing different playbills throughout the history of American musicals).

    Next, I had to decide on what the lower part of the playbill would look like - where a musical would usually have their poster, underneath the yellow text box. I settled on an image of a specific theater -to use as my background. The theater is very old and is still in use today, so I thought it would be a nice design choice for a course which was focused on both history and the present day. Then, I wanted to choose fonts. I downloaded a playbill-inspired Western font to use for the heading text box, and used a narrow serif font for the title of the course

    For my second draft, I ended up settling on a design which didn't use the playbill header. Although the primary reason was because my professor didn't seem to recognize the playbill design, I was also on the fence about it in the first place - the yellow header was a very different color from the rest of it and made the poster look pretty busy. I considered making two designs, but decided it wasn't worth the effort since I would only be turning in one. I put the white text on colored backgrounds, and changed the focal line to be diagonal.

    In this process, I learned a lot about how to use certain photo editing tools. I do digital art so I was familiar with some tools, but I had never had to be as exact with alignment as I had to be during this process. Overall, I'm happy with my finished product - there are probably things that could be done to improve it, but I think it gets the point across succinctly and I'm really happy with my color choices in particular.

    I think a playbill design with the yellow "playbill" header would have still been helpful had this poster actually been put up, since it would catch the eye of students who are already interested in musicals, but it did make the whole design look busy. One thing I could've done was put the word "playbill" on top, but that could be confusing and make people think it's a performance ad (and "playbill" itself is trademarked so I'm not sure of legality there).

    I've done a little bit of graphic design before for my website, but this assignment made me think about a print medium more than I typically do. I'm not used to having to keep my documents a certain size, or to having to severely limit the amount of information on something. Overall, I'm happy with my design and I'm happy about what I learned.