100 Things// Geometry Poster

These geometry poster started off as the hot dog book from earlier and morphed into some designs for this brief. The basic principle is that the shape looks like the top of a diamond, with its intricate detail and perfect geometry. I also started with an image of a sunset, which sort of dictated the colour scheme for the rest of the development to the poster. I found one that would produce some earthy colours when I expanded from the image with the circular rows of triangles to reflect the colour of the earth the diamonds are taken from. I also thought the image of a sunset would be suitable because it represents a darkness/ things coming to an end/ death in many ways.

I eventually produced 14 variations of this poster, some with pretty big design changes and some with minor tweaks to test which one was best. A major set back from doing this was that none of the macs in college can open this file because it needs tons of RAM, so on this occasion PC:1 Mac:0.

 This was my start point when I finished the rosette style design for the poster and began to create the exact same stretched out lines melting off the central figure. All in all it was realised that this was too plain and way to similar to the hotdog book so I scrapped this idea before I went too far down this line. I did a bit of experimenting with the direction of the lines thinking that with some clever colouring I could turn the whole image into a shape that looks like a drop of blood or something that is bleeding.
 

 The design then moved onto a more textured background that was quickly dropped. It looked to grunge/emo and gave out the work impression of a hardcore band rather than a poster promotion facts. So I made a big step toward the final design and added some crazy geometrical patterns and very faint text. The patterns were suppose to be a continuation from the patterns of the main diamond rosette shape but didn't quite fit.

 Another addition was some broken lines of text. It was more of an experiment than an actual final thing but for now it reads 'Have you ever thought about; Conflict Diamonds?'. Which is a pretty cheesy tag-line. It was also incredibly hard to read on the posters because it sat as a negative on some very thin lines. Also diagonal lines where added at a 45 degree angle to beef up the white background, again, slightly unneeded at the end of the day.

At this point I believe the poster took some better form. I added some very heavy text and eradicated all of the confusing lines whizzing about the place. Another design feature here is the Spanish style question marks to start and end the title. I though that this would add more emphasis on the nature of the flyer that will be the accompanying the poster, which I have outlined a space for on this design with some text that invites the reader to take a one. Another important development here is the use of read to once again hint at blood and violence, its not over the top but a subtle hint.

However I really felt that the bold text was way too overpowering and totally threw the whole poster off balance. Here you can see some experiments where I tried to fit text into the lattice of the diamond shape. This was an improvement but I really did not want to mess up the symmetry of the shape as it stood so was not good enough.

 I also looked at expanding the red sections to look more like blood by bleeding them down the page. This was quite a silly development how I can look back but it was worth a try to see where the idea would take the poster as a whole. I think that this version is, again, unbalanced and too over the top for a serious poster.

This is the final version that will be printed off. I have taken the title up to the top again but shortened it dramatically to simply 'Conflict Diamonds'. I also used stellfish because it is very condensed so I could make the title huge across the top. By being a negative on some thin lines it does not take away the focus from the shape but is still clearly there, which is something that I hope will be true on the large scale print. I did a small print as a test and it worked well. I will also probably get rid of the flyer outline on the final print because the paper size could change and ruin the scale.