Project Four

Design two posters, a front and back, that promote a conference or event that you have created. 

Final work due Thursday Nov. 9. See the class calendar for in-progress reviews and other milestones.

Work at a Glance

1. Invent a conference, that may be local, regional, national, or international.
2. Define the conference’s events, purpose, guest speakers, and duration (days, weekend, or weeks).
3. Create a persuasive poster, that is attention-getting, spurring the viewer to learn more about the conference and/or attend the conference.
4. Format the poster for printing at the RVRC plotter, delivering your final designs (front and back) as a high-quality print formatted PDF.

Defining the Conference. Conduct extensive, independent research to learn about world events, business events, humanitarian, and/or art events. Your conference may be for any one of those areas or a combination. Explore mindmapping and concept boarding to get your thoughts visualized and begin to organize them, searching for a trajectory or destination, identifying or creating your conference. Create 2 Creative Briefs and 2 Concept Boards (as moodboard or mindmap or concept board) before moving to the design phase.

Creative Brief, Required Reading:

1. Mastering the Creative Brief
2. Creative Brief Must-Haves
3. Simple Yet Effective Creative Briefs

Making Your Poster. Creative and rendering methods are wide open for this project, although the final project must include the following:

• 2 Posters, a two-sided poster with a large visual on one side and a more information-rich piece of content on the back
• Size: 18-inches by 24-inches, folds down to 9-inches by 6-inches as a self-mailer
• Folded-Format: the folded format is important, but the content does not need to fit into the 6-by-9 cells of the folded format, so do not feel like you must lock that content into those rectangles (although you could if your concept warranted it)
• Imagery: created by you
• Copy: minimum 50 words on the poster backside, authored by you, providing more information about the event

Your poster's front-side, the presentation side, can use type and image, be all type, or be mostly image with a little type. See some examples here, at PRINT magazine. And stylistically, be sure the style promotes the message and event. Don't use style just for the sake of style, just because you like it. Use style with a purpose.


Process & Design, Required Reading:

• Graphic Design Thinking pages 16-21 and 140-165
• Stop, Think, Go, Do! chapters 3, 5 and 7

Image resolution and image quality are important. So make sure your images are of good quality, without any pixels or pixel-noise present in the final printed file.

Final Submission. All posters will need to be formatted as PDFs with .125-inch bleed around all edges. Save to our Turnstile_2 folder on or before our Nov. 9 deadline.

Evaluation: worth 100 points total

• 10 Craft & Technique: use of materials, execution of work, reproduction and technical quality
• 40 Design Composition: unity and variety, hierarchy, layout and presentation of information, overall originality and resonance of posters and images created for poster
• 30 Concept & Design Thinking: research, appropriate concept, use of creative brief and moodboard(s)
• 20 Presentation & Professionalism: following directions and meeting deadlines, understanding of the project and solutions

Goals:

• to conduct research and brainstorm to help define a design problem
• to develop a concept and articulate it via a concept abstract
• to explore physical thinking and unconventional tools as ways to give form to concepts and develop the visual vernacular
• to design an evocative and unique poster that commands attention and resonates