Put Em' On A Poster!

Design does not happen by accident. It is a deliberate effort to communicate something creatively and effectively to an audience. It can accomplish these things with ease, but it can also put them in a blender to the point where neither of them are recognizable anymore. The simplest choices and most intricate details can either make or break this objective.

Effective Posters Are Effective

This poster is a good design for two very simple reasons. These reasons include color scheme, and legibility. The color scheme used a tertiary color scheme which consists of three colors. Blue, Red, and Yellow are the three primary colors and create a very contrast heavy look. This allows the viewer to easily distinguish the differences between the highlights, shadows and mid tones. The legibility attribute of this poster is very high. Is it a plain background, with a portrait of Barack Obama taking up ninety percent of the surface area which makes it prominent. The word “Hope” at the bottom is very thick, and a pretty big size. This makes it easy to assign meaning to the poster for the viewer. The word itself is very simple and conveys a lot of different thoughts in people’s minds. Andy Warhol made this kind of color scheme famous, and a lot of people like it for the simple reason that it is eye catching.

This is another example of a well designed poster. It is a poster for the movie “Fight Club”. The image in the middle is very striking and kind of gives an intimidating feeling to someone who would be looking at it. The primary figure is well lit, and you can see the bruises on his face. You can see the emotions that he is portraying very well. He looks like a pretty normal guy, but at the same time you can see the second figure in the background. This guy is very dark and not a lot of light is on his face. He has very messy hair and you can see a kind of evil smile on his face. The composition of these two figures communicates a “skeletons in the closet” type of feel. You get the sense that the figure in the back is separate but attached to the figure in the front. And you can understand that they both have very distinct personalities.

This well designed poster was used for a concert featuring a band called The Black Keys. The orange color used in this poster is very flat, and there is something about it that makes you want to look at it. It is very easy on the eyes and doesn’t give off a busy feeling. It is calming. The name of the band is front and center which is a strong communication of the purpose for the poster. The border around the corners of the poster also directs your eyes to the middle of the paper where the name of the band is. The use of thick and thin lines creates a nice contrast. The thick font of the title and the intricate details of the sugar skull balance each other out and create a nice visual. A subtle design element that also lets you know it is advertising music is the use of a keyboard for the teeth in the skull, this is very creative and the small details like this really bring designs together and make them look cohesive.

Poorly Designed Posters Are Poor

 This poster is poorly designed because of its legibility. The yellow dots are unrecognizable to the average person who doesn’t play video games. It looks like just a cluster of random yellow dots when in fact, it is supposed to be the silhouette of an older style diving helmet. The game “bioshock” takes place underwater, and the antagonist of the game is always wearing a diving helmet that resembles that dot pattern. But the average person who looks at this poster will not know that, so it makes it very hard to read. The colors used in this poster are also very bland and flat. There is no real hard contrast between the colors and this doesn’t catch your eye in any way. The writing on it is also very small. It is designed to be a simple narrative, but it is too simple to the point where it is just plain boring.

 This is another example of a poorly designed video game poster. The main image is a crow bar, which again is integral to the game, but nobody who doesn’t play the game would know that. This simple image does not give any clues about the subject matter of the game, and that is a problem. Some video game posters have really intense battle scenes that let the viewer know what the game consists of, even if they do not play video games. An old person who doesn’t even know what video games are can look at a Call of Duty poster and get a solid idea of what the game is. So this posters is seriously lacking in legbility also. On top of that, the font is extremely boring. It is very blocky and doesn’t command attention. The same goes for the color scheme, it is a very basic orange and black scheme. Orange and black are sometimes oversused and this is one of those cases.

 This poster is another example of poor design, primarily because of color choice and design hierarchy. It uses an analogous color scheme meaning that is uses different shades of one color. The color that is uses is blue, and this gives is a very somber and calming feeling. However, this strategy creates low contrast and makes the illustration on the poster fall into the background. The mountains are not as prominent as they could be with some different colors thrown in, and the darkness of the color scheme makes the people in the foreground almost invisible. You really have to search hard to see those people down there, and they are the main subject of the poster. It is never good when the main element of a design is lost, and that is what is happening in this poster. The size of the text for the title is also too small to read comfortably. You can clearly see “Hobbit”, but everything else requires eye strain to make out. It should not be difficult for viewers to read your poster.

Poster design is just a small segment of the design world. But they are very easy to dissect and there are many of them available to critique. Some other things that can be critiqued in the same way are paintings, photography, and advertising. Design is everywhere around us, but whether we notice it or appreciate it is up to us. It takes a keen eye, and active observing to completely understand.