Poster design
Due: Thursday, March 4
General Requirements
Design a poster that you could display on campus that will raise student awareness about an issue you think is important. The issue could be a local issue such as pedestrian safety on campus or a national or international issue such as voter registration or the conflict in Darfur.
The poster should use a combination of words and images, be produced using Photoshop, and be scaled to print on standard 8.5 x 11 inch paper. Posters in general can be various sizes and produced using other computer programs or printing methods, but one of our goals is to lean the basics of Photoshop, so we will limit our production to that program and stay with a standard paper size for ease of printing.
As in the Visual Poetry homework, your poster should show evidence of the CRAP (Contrast, Repetition, Alignment, and Proximity) principles as explained in The Non-Designer’s Design Book.
Deliverables
- A design plan: Due Thursday, February 25 in the Writing Studio forum (see below for details)
- A hand-drawn, draft sketch of your poster (see step 2 below)
- The printed poster (in color if you use color in your poster)
- An electronic copy of the poster (JPG format, uploaded in the Writing Studio dropbox)
- A reflection/analysis of your poster: posted in the Writing Studio forum (see below for details).
To complete the project, follow these step
- Draft a design plan in the Writing Studio Forum (see below for details) and begin gathering the materials you might want to include in the poster. The materials will be your images and text. If there are particular digital images you want to use, collect these images in one folder that you can bring to class on your jump drive. You may use non-digitized images but will have to scan them.
- Sketch your poster idea before attempting to build it using Photoshop. Once you have a sketch you are happy with, you can then identify the steps required to produce it using Photoshop.
- Produce the poster using Photoshop.
- Save your poster as a .jpg file and upload it to the Poster Design folder in the Writing Studio Dropbox.
- Write a 250 word reflection on the poster project that explains your design plan and analyzes how well you think the final poster meets the expectations of your design plan. Post this in the Writing Studio forum.
Design Plan Questions to Consider
Purpose: Why do you want to communicate to an audience about the issue, topic, or subject you have chosen? Do you want to inform on an issue or provide factual information or instructions or advice? Do you want to offer informed opinions or persuade your audience to adopt your viewpoint or take action on an issue? Are you offering social criticism, for example critiquing American eating habits or television programing?
Audience: For this project, the CSU community is your audience. However, are you targeting a specific subset of this community—a target audience within the CSU community? For example, freshmen, faculty, cyclists, those pursuing a particular major. What is the target audience’s demographics (age, gender, race, etc.)? What are their interests, hobbies, political and/or social leanings as you imagine them? What will your poster have to do to appeal to them?
Context: What background knowledge are you assuming your audience will bring to your project? How do you imagine the situation in which they view your poster? In order to answer the previous question you will have to think about where you will display the poster.
Next consider the following:
Medium: Why will your message work well in a poster format? What did you do to take advantage of the poster format to effectively communicate your message?
Arrangement: How will you organize your project? Remember that posters often compete for attention, especially on campus. How does your design grab attention and direct the reader to the information in an effective manner? Consider “lines of sight,” your color palette, and the CRAP principles here.
Strategies: How will you establish your authority (ethos) for your message? Will your poster be obviously connected with an organization that will lend it credibility or will it be an anonymous message? Do you want your project to appeal to your readers’ sense of logic and objective reasoning (logos) or to appeal to emotion (pathos) or to both?
Visual Design Resources
Analyzing Posters
Here you will find links to lots of classic posters. It is a resource page for the poster chapter in the textbook Compose, Design, Advocate by Anne Frances Wysocki and Dennis Lynch. The first link to Posters American Style is broken. It should be: http://americanart.si.edu/exhibitions/online/posters/
Before and After: How to Design Cool Stuff
This site has free downloads of several “lessons” on visual design.
ColorSchemer Gallery
This site provides sample color palettes. You also can view the hexadecimal code (the color codes used in websites) by mousing over each color.
Color Scheme Designer
Another tool to help you develop pleasing color sets.
