2 More Posters

 Here are 2 of my finals for a couple of classes.

This poster I made for my Advanced Graphic Design class. I decided to make a poster for Hoofbeats to Healing, a therapeutic horse-back riding center.

The parameters of the assignment were pretty open-ended but the theme for the assignment was "Design for Good." Each one of us in the class chose an issue that needed a voice, whether it was breast cancer awareness, nutrition, manic depressive disorder, anti-bullying, or something else. We then tried to create a poster about the topic that could maybe make a difference in the world.

"Design for Good" is an initiative by the AIGA that we learned about at a recent lecture at Salt Lake Design Week. Watch this video to learn more about it. The video is well done and I think it is interesting. Design for good really isn't a new idea, but what the AIGA is trying to do now is create a network of people to help solve problems and make a difference.

I still haven't had my final critique on this poster, so it is still a work in progress, but this is where it is at right now.

Here is another poster I did for my Design history & Theory class. Weber State supposedly has a pretty incredible music department and it recently became an "all-Steinway" school, thanks to generous donations. The parameters of this assignment was to create a poster that displayed the names of the donors and thanked them for their contribution, and it also had to be in the Swiss Style.

The copy was pretty strict, we couldn't change anything in the copy in order to make it work better for our design. My concept was to instead of just listing the donors names and thanking them, I wanted to literally create a piano out of the donors names. Basically my message was this: the donors contributions literally created the Steinway pianos at Weber State. By doing this, I had to remember to create hierarchy from the donor's names. Those that donated more needed to be emphasized more than those who donated less. Making this actually work was incredibly hard. There were SO MANY names and I couldn't change them in any way. It was like putting together a puzzle. I tried 3 different times to make this actually resemble a piano, each time taking a couple of hours.

I also had to keep in mind the Swiss Style. The Swiss Style, or the International Style, was developed in Switzerland in the 1950s. The characteristics of the Swiss style are: clean designs that are refined down to necessity, structured (designed on a grid) designs, sans-serif typefaces used, asymmetrical layouts, flush left ragged right text, etc etc. I hated the first 2 renditions I did of this poster, but I finally came up with this one and I am pretty pleased.

I will be done with school on Tuesday! Yippee! Graphic design is hard. Some days I feel like I am the worst designer on the planet. Other days I feel like I am starting to get it. One day I will get there... (hopefully).