100 Things// The Diamond Truth Poster

The purpose of this poster is to promote a flyer with information about the failure of the Kimberly Process, and the flooding of illegal diamonds onto the legal market. The flyer will have very similar aesthetics in one side and facts and text on the back. This poster will therefore be all about aesthetics to me. This poster will aim to be very simple and will use the diamond grid from the 'Diamonds are death' Poster to allow the words 'The Diamond Truth' to appear through the net as a some negative text. I chose the phrase 'The Diamond Truth' as a play on words relating to the phrase 'The Golden Truth' or 'The Truth is Golden'.

Again I produced several variations of the poster to see which one worked best. In this case I made 11 some with major, some with minor, differences in relation to the overall design.

I stared with a plain black on white design and used bebas to get a general idea to how I would start removing the diamonds to create text and image. This biggest task here was getting the number of diamond rows across to match the number needed to spell out the longest word, diamond, effectively. On top of this some letters like 'M' needed several tweaks to get right. After I had finished the basic design I began to add colour.

I started with blue and yellow. I wanted the blue to reflect the colour of [cartoon] diamonds. The yellow frame was added as an experiment at first but its stayed because it added a nice picture-frame/ cross-stick look to the poster. I also experimented with the tonal fade template I made ages ago for the first poster, giving the image on the right some depth to the text while folding back the corners. A fairly nice optical illusion...

I then began to look at other colours I have been using so far and chose the light tonal variants of previous posters, mainly dusty, earth colours and blood red. This sunk the text into the page though somehow making the image less clear. As a result I looked at returning to the original image of solid back and white and experimented with various tones of Key in the CMYK sliders.

Using the blue, light blue and yellow poster I had made earlier and adding a saturated red colour was a great advancement of this posters colour development. Most importantly the colour red representing blood and blue representing diamonds pull the theory of the poster together and look aesthetically pleasing together as well. I spent some time fiddling with different fade effects in illustrator but ended up going for the less dramatic poster (left). I plan to print the poster on some nice pearly grey stock which will hopefully compliment the colours used so far.