Proces and Production 2 / aidan nolan

Typographic design and communication through posters was the topic of this session. In the first session I learnt how to use type and how it is chosen for a particular mood or audience. Now, I must bring this into practice to create posters. I had a selection of four briefs and had to answer three, creating a poster for each. I am to be presenting my final three posters next session, so it is important that I read the brief carefully and include everything required.

Here is the first brief that I answered in the process and production session. This brief was advertising the Huddersfield Craft Beer Expedition in 2017, taking place for the first time. I had to include all of the required text and follow the rules set within the brief. I was only allowed to use type and no imagery, only allowed to use red, black and white and to stick to three type sizes, large, medium and small. In the poster above, which I created in the production workshop, I used a font that did not reflect or express the idea of craft and the beer fan base. However, I created the image of a pint of beer with the type using techniques learnt from last week, Vertical and horizontal type scales, kerning and tracking. I used a shade of red to create the beer like impression and white type to express the froth and bubbles at the top of the pint, for both the information type and the image impression type. I knew I had come back to this poster and change the type after the session, to reflect the correct genre of the expedition.

In response to the failures of the previous poster, I have chosen a type that reflects the genre and craft of the beer expedition. The type that I have chose is 'Delirium NCV' and 'Delirium Neon NCV', I researched this type ind it is commonly used to reflect the aura of craft and beer. Using similar techniques as before, I created the structure of a beer pint and placed the text below in good composition to complete the poster. I have continued the colour scheme and text size, the only difference is the choice of font. Delirium NCV and Neon NCV make make the design look much more design efficient and relate-able to the craft of beer, whereas before the font was too playful and bubbly and communicated the wrong attributes such as, childish, immature and bouncy.

For this brief I had to research a designer and create a poster that correctly expresses their way of thinking and the techniques that they integrate into their designs. I chose to create a poster around Lance Wyman. I chose him because of the way he used type and creates linear patterns instantly caught my eye and I wanted to discover more. To correctly answer this brief I had to construct type in a way that relates to your chosen designer to show the acquisition of a newly learnt skill. With this type you had to type the designers name, construct an upper and lowercase alphabet, with the addition of a few numerals and glyph, then create a short paragraph of why you have chosen this specific designer and their years active in the field of graphic design.

Lance Wayman's branding for the Mexico 1966 Olympics was the main area of his designs that made me want to choose him. He uses linear lines around the type he creates to express pulsations alluding from mexico and how it draws attention to the nation hosting the Olympics. This technique is a great a way to illustrate significance and aura around a subject. His linear waves of patterns continued throughout the whole of the mexico 1966 Olympics and his unique style of creating clear linear patterns has followed him throughout his long career. He now designs specialising in systems for cities, events, institutions and transit systems for people to observe to navigate.

I used the font Avenir light and duplicated it to create the linear pattern. I expanded and created outlines of the type so I could extend certain elements to create extruding linear patterns. Also, similar to Wayman I used shape layers to create pulsating patterns from a subject, however unlike Wayman I struggled to create pulsating patterns exuding from my type. Maybe sometime in the future i will come back and create this effect to correctly reflect his practice.

Finally, for my final brief I have created a poster advertising the Huddersfield design network Wilsons Republic. The brief demanded to only used the colours of red, white and black and to use the font minion pro and the whole theme had to be based around the word 'resilience'. I was informed to look at all of their previous posters to get the idea of what they are about and how they present them selves. I discovered they produce illustrative, typographic and strictly abide by the use of grids, often showing the grid they use by filling a section with colour.

I decided I wanted to create an illustrative design. I created a fist punching through the ground to express resilience, conveying the notion of breaking through barriers and having your voice heard. However I thought the fist on its own was too vague and needed some illustrative patterns around the fist to give it more essence of resilience. But, this still didn't achieve what I wanted to communicate.

Eventually, I found a way to communicate resilience and link the design to Wilsons republic in a clever way. I created the fist to hold the logo icon of a pipe to further relate the poster to Wilsons Republic. The white pipe completes the composition and I no longer needed the eccentric patterns to express resilience. It now conveys a message that the design network breaks through barriers to overcome design problems and still remaining resilient, by calmly holding the iconic pipe in the end.

To conclude the process and production workshop, I had great fun creating and overcoming problems, even though I was struggling for time whilst facing these problems. Especially, the Wilsons Republic poster. It was a challenging task but one that I eventually finished and have learnt a lot from, in terms of what and how much a poster really needs.