For this exercise I need to make three museum posters, each targeting a different age bracket.
The first thing I did was the most straightforward, went outside and looked for museum posters. I didn’t find this super helpful, there wasn’t much on offer.
I felt like this was a good exercise to return to Pinterest, feeling like it would be a useful tool for this particular exercise. I wanted to find artwork in a fairly specific category and wasn’t too concerned about sourcing references or time periods, I just wanted a general impression to start thinking about how to approach my posters. So Pinterest was perfect. I made a board, and I’m happy with it. Some of the ones I found particularly valuable were the posters aimed at children, which I was having a bit of trouble thinking through in my head.
I liked the contrast and composition of this poster for the Hokusai Museum: https://pin.it/jzei32yxedus4a
I paid a visit to my local museum. It’s a very small museum in a small town, but it is lovingly curated. It has a fairly wide array of artefacts from several time periods, which was great to see. I brought a camera and made sure the curators didn’t mind me snapping pictures! And I took a lot of reference photos. I did a couple of quick sketches and took down some impressions too.
My next goal was to categorise the material according to the age brackets required. I had a lot of trouble with this. I mean, children are not really a group associated with having a strong love of museums, so it was difficult to come up with a design for that group. Of course there’s an added layer of challenge in that I needed to make three posters, and the exercise specifically begs the question of whether the posters ought to be a cohesive set or not, and I supposed they should be. I thought about if I were to see a number of posters around town for the same museum, I feel like having three completely disparate designs would be a bad idea, even if they were overtly aiming at different audiences. I think a more successful campaign would follow a similar unifying format for all the posters. It would get people to associate this one motif with this one institution, and I think that would be the most convincing way to design these posters.
In the end I decided on my format. I wanted the main focus to be the museum artefact, and then a background illustration contextualising it. Finishing off the poster would be a caption and the museum information.
For the children’s poster I decided on a Stone Age arrowhead with an illustration of an archeologist involved in excavation. I chose this thinking that children are generally interested in digging in dirt and finding weird stuff, and also careers that involve fun easily recognisable outfits. Using this highly sophisticated market evaluation, I drew up my design.
For the teen poster, I went for something a little different. I chose an arrest warrant for Constance Markiewicz, an Irish revolutionary leader, socialist, suffragette, and general badass. My initial ideas were all targeted at teen boys, sort of violent, war stuff around the Vikings or IRA. But I figured given the current social and political climate, it might interest young girls to learn about a revolutionary hero in our country’s history who happened to be a woman. I understand the final design might not scream “teen” but I think it’s an outside-the-box idea and hopefully makes sense.
Finally for the poster for the general adult audience I chose a sword blade and an illustration of a Celt from the Iron Age. This one is a more straightforward choice, I think it’s a visually interesting artefact and from my experience Irish adults have a strong patriotic fascination with all things “Celtic”.
After doing line drawings for all the posters I did a quick wash over with watercolour to give an outline of what colours I would use for the final design. Well, I was almost positive that the fineliner I was using was waterproof, but apparently I was wrong… so there was a lot of bleeding and it prevented me from really developing the images with watercolour, which was a pity. Regardless, the basic idea comes through in the finished colour visuals. For the main colours in the posters I stuck to primary colours, and a good contrasting secondary colour to complement it.
So, in looking through the images again, I think it makes more sense to have the Celt poster be the one aimed at teens, being sort of simple and exciting, and the Markievicz poster to be the one aimed at adults, being more complex.
Finally I needed to complete a final rendition of at least one of the posters. I decided to finish the artwork digitally, and picked the Markievicz poster, it being the one that I think needed the most development.
I made some minor changes to the composition and experimented with a few textures and overlay layers. Overall I’m relatively happy with it, though I wonder if it reads more as “magazine cover” rather than “poster”. I think in the future when attempting posters I should aim to work as simply as possible to make them bold and readable from distance.
Josh Robbins OCA Learning Log 