firstly, on employing tools and incremental process.
starting at the very beginning, we've used adobe illustrator, the various printers, the konica copier and the scanner to distort our line studies, the projector to reconfigure our line studies, our feet, bikes, cars, skateboards and cameras to attain imagery from around town, exactos & cut paper to collage our first posters, back into illustrator and then into photoshop to continue pursuing the paths we first discovered through collage all the way until our final prints for critique. as always the incremental process was invaluable, given that we could never have reached anything like our final pieces without having had to go through as many small steps as we did. as a rule, to have done something very unheard of, particularly in a long, complicated sequence, is to have the opportunity to create something nobody had ever thought of before.
and now, final reflections, on some pertinent questions, the three remaining (after that one up there) are as follows:
activating and arranging the graphic space.
formal & conceptual juxtaposition.
communicating visual identity of a location
beginning with valentine:
i wanted my pairing of image and line composition in this poster to be basically seamless and full bleed, to be the poster itself, the ground, rather than be the figure on the poster. this transition allows the figures of the lightbulbs and particularly the text to step forward in importance, as everything, the color, the arrow shapes, and the density of lightbulbs, leads the eye to the left edge, at a height that (if i'm not mistaken) should reference the golden phi ratio. this composition contains loud, high contrast stripes, juxtaposed against a deep, low saturation glow of color. i wanted to evoke feelings of vaudeville, the performative aspect of these lights from the uptown theater. they are obviously not lights for utility, but for ornament, and to imply entertainment. formally, the juxtaposition of these two elements should result in smooth, clean continuity, with no cracks in which unwanted meanings might try to hide. i desaturated the current red & yellow of this light display to hint at the theater's age and history, a microcosm for the age and history of the entire valentine area, now filled with colleges and shopping in addition to housing and entertainment.
my arrangement of the space for the plaza was rather more restrained, not only because it looks nicer but because that imagery & handling thereof is the most appropriate to the look and feel of the plaza itself. i let the interplay between the placement of the text and warmer, lighted area towards opposite edges pull your eyes back and forth. together these posters should play a game of catch with your eyes, with the plaza taking you from its name and out through the warm spotlight into the curves of the valentine, which slings all the way up and out before the arrows drag you back in, passing you back off into the plaza. formally, this study was rather more of a comparison than an extension or a continuation because the shapes are very similar, and they are related in both the horizontal and vertical handling of the images. the plaza is a very, very heavily ornamented area of kansas city, and so, by keeping my composition relatively simple, i run less of a risk of completely overrunning my work with flourishes and architecture.
i liked the idea of having both of my posters related in their treatment, their aesthetic, and also their content. the uptown theatre and the plaza were both built in the 1920s so their visual relationship is even stronger than i had originally presumed when i started. learning this helped cement my decision to tie them together, and let them each in their own way evoke a certain antiqueness while still playing with the idea of their modern incarnations, stylized and simplified into something clean and vectored. by letting the two posters, each with a very different syntax, even if they use the same visual language, "talk," so to speak, i feel as though the viewer has almost learned more about kansas city (not just the popular districts) and its architectural and cultural history.
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