Week Six | Nelson

Design Strategy and Client Information: My not-for-profit organization is Camp Good Days and Special Times, a summer camp for kids with cancer. I chose Dance Marathon as I’ve been involved with it throughout high school and it is a huge event in my community. Each year, a student creates an ad campaign always focused around people dancing and the clock that shows a countdown of 12 hours, and this design is used on posters and t-shirts participants receive. I wanted my design to be simple, since the demographic is high school students, trying to get them involved to go out and get the sponsors needed for the event. I also wanted the design to be something different and to incorporate dancing in a different way, or to leave it out entirely; with this in mind, I focused my design more around the idea of the “marathon” and stayed away from the more cliché dancing. I wanted a design that was eye catching, and that you could simply glance at as walking through the halls of the high school and get the most important information.

Typeface: I chose Adobe Caslon Pro as the font for the water bottles. I wanted a typeface that would actually be used on beverages, since I based my water bottles on pictures of Aquafina I had taken. To contrast the serif of the bottle, and be more modern for the young students in high school, I used Gill Sans for the actual information on the event. Besides being modern, I wanted this portion to really stand out, and since I knew I was going to make the font wave-y to fit in the splash of water, I wanted a sans serif font that was good for readability.

Visuals: When brainstorming for this poster, my first ideas went to the cliché ones I had already seen used by the school: dancers, counting down and musical themes. I looked at the word marathon, and began to think of things associated with that event in itself, outside the traditional runners. Water bottles came to mind, since at DM itself, there’s lots of water floating around for the worn out dancers. From there, I thought of what I could do with the water bottles, initially thinking of a dancer gulping thirstily from it as others danced around. But I wanted a more simple design, and came up with the idea of manipulating the water inside the bottle to fit the tagline “Don’t walk. Don’t run. Just dance.” I decided on using three bottles, one for each part of the tagline, and having the water represent walking (still), running ("choppy" water) and dancing (exploding from the bottle), with all the relevant information spewing out of the “dancing” bottle. The colors of the water bottle were taken from the images of the Aquafina bottle label using the eyedropper tool. I wanted the background to be very light and have a water-y aspect, so chose a very light blue , and then outlined the water from the bottles in a shade slightly darker than the lightest blue of the bottles to tie it together.