Week 6: Irina Dvalidze

Design Strategy and Client Information
My poster design was created for an event hosted by Play It by Ear, a new non-profit student organization that aim to “perform, impact, and educate utilizing music and the arts.” Play It by Ear primarily supports the Breast Cancer Research Foundation for 2010. This year they will be hosting live performances during Relay For Life. The poster’s demographic is the student population, since it is primarily a university event, which was the primary reason I wanted to have a fun and simple visual with direct address statements. The organization has a specific amount of funds at their disposal, however I wanted to limit color use, which is why I opted for the poster to use primarily white space.

Choice of Typeface
I chose condensed extrabold Futura, through out the poster, with the exception of the date, which I did in regular. I find Futura to have very a clean geometric visual appeal. It is very straightforward which is why I chose to use it. I did try to give it variety by changing kerning and font size throughout the poster. I chose to do the date and place in regular because I wanted it to be easily readable, without much effort from the viewer.

Visuals
I needed to have a visual referencing music, since it is a musical event, and I also wanted to play around with the name of the organization, since it has such a visual title “Play It by Ear.” Initially I had an idea of a musical clef resembling the outline of an ear with text worked into the outline to tell the general info. However this idea had to be scrapped because of the execution difficulty and visual complexity, which might have been lost of the viewers. So instead I chose a vintage symbol of music, a gramophone, and worked the ear into it as a visual “trick.” I used block color to liven up the visual.