Project Statement:

Design Culture Now is a lecture series related to contemporary design and features four main speakers. The focus of this project was to create a poster that contained the information for the lecture series. Within this, typographic hierarchy was a strong focus. The information needed to be easily legible in an organized manner for the audience to have a clear understanding of the event and create excitement for contemporary design.

Before starting this project, it was important to learn and understand the principles of Gestalt. The important principles being proximity, similarity, continuance, closure, position, and direction. Using these principles, I was able to create a strong relationship and unity between each body of copy. In addition to Gestalt principles, I learned how to create typographic hierarchy, and the importance of alignment, grids, and negative space. In doing this I wanted to also create the poster in the style of contemporary design.

From the idea of accomplishing a clear typographic hierarchy in a set space, I started by making sketches of potential layouts. Following this, I choose fonts that were simple and had multiple weight options in the font family. Next was to move my ideas to InDesign. First, I divided the space by utilizing the guide and grids function in InDesign. Subsequently, I chose a point on the grid and created an x and y-axis from that focal point. To create spatial zones of positive and negative space I put rectangles as a guide of where my text would be. Next, I applied the principles of position/direction by activating both the x and y-axis. I did these steps multiple times to create different layouts. After the first one, each one after I pushed the limits of the design further and further, which led to breaking some of the rules in the end. When I got to the addition of color, I decided to focus on the primary colors as an allude to design. I felt that the design of my type was strong enough that color was the right addition instead of a graphic.