The brief

Produce a poster (297mm x 420mm) that celebrates a colour of your choice.  Choose a colour that has a meaning that you want to explore and celebrate.  Think about what the colour you have chosen means both to you and to other people and create something that celebrates that meaning.

Work only with your chosen colour, its complementary colour and black and white.  You can include text, collages, illustrations and photographs.  This project is as much about visual dynamics and contrast as it is about creating something with meaning.  You need to submit at least three variations of your poster as well as the finished artwork.

My choice of colour

I am excited about this project for the reason that I truly enjoy a colour challenge.  Peach is my favourite colour because it’s not stereotypical pink and yet energetic, soft and feminine.  Peach comes in a vast array of different tones and shades, depending on how much orange is added and how red the orange might be.

I am using peach in this project to covey the meaning of femininity.  The modern day women are so many things which brings the words by Alanis Morissette to mind: “I’m a little bit of everything, all rolled into one.”

The meaning of the colour peach

Light pastel peaches are often seen as sweet, pleasant, and friendly.  Bright and intense peach colours, on the other hand, can symbolise vitality, energy, playfulness, and encouragement.

Since orange and blue are complementary colours, royal blue and peach can create a dynamic combination and a contemporary and summery feel.

Peach and cream, just like the dessert, are a great colour combination.  The cream appears bright and crisp against a vibrant peach, creating a sharp contrast.  A pale peach and muted cream will create a warmer, gentler combination.

Peach, gold, and mint work in harmony to create a sophisticated palette with a sense of understated femininity. (Adobe, 2023)

I tried a few colour combinations in figure 1 and referenced the hex codes for future use.

Establishing a subject matter

I explored the words feminine in today’s time and the 1950s in my spider diagram (figure 2), which led me to a funny cartoon in The New Yorker, issued Sept. 27, 2021.  The comic is about two crocodiles looking fierce above the water, but underneath the water, they are knitting.  It is a well-known fact that knitting has therapeutic benefits as a self-help tool to manage stress, depression, anxiety disorders, chronic pain and more.  The downside, however, is that in today’s society obsessed with eternal youth, knitting has been stereotyped as something old people do.

I analysed this idea further and used the words “don’t let anyone see” as a starting point to generate an original idea.  I eventually came up with the narrative I want to use for this poster design.

As an introvert, it is peculiar to me how extroverts can sit and talk for hours on end and not get tired of doing “nothing”.  Of course, they are not doing “nothing”, but from an introvert’s perspective it looks like “nothing”.  

This is going to be the starting point for exploring with thumbnail sketches the most effective way to visualise this narrative. 

I have collected visual references (figure 3) to better visualise the feel and mood I want to create with this poster as well as the style I want to use.  The Abstract Cities exercise taught me how to simplify my design, and I want to use that process again in this design, together with collage and paper-cut techniques.

Exploring through thumbnail sketches, I come up with two ideas that I will use with minimum text and just one word, “Extrovert”.  The other two ideas are with the heading “Extroverts” and the phrase, “Don’t let anyone see how much we enjoy doing nothing”.  The four ideas are the bottom four sketches of figure 4, no. 10, 11, 12 and 13.

The thumbnails are in black and white to get my head around idea generating before I add the colour.  Next, I will take the bottom four sketches and work on the colours.  Sketch 10 carries the narrative that extroverts enjoy conversation so much that they will miss important things happening around them.  Sketch 11 and 12 are two variations of people spending valuable work-time socialising. 

I want to keep the tone of the posters positive and light.  Figure 5, top right’s colour choice of the speech bubble content might be too harsh.  The black element seems dark and heavy and might be perceived negatively.  I will change the top right colours of the speech bubble to be similar to the speech bubble of the top left illustration.

The bottom left illustration (figure 5) has too many texture overlays like halftone and crosshatching, so I will use less texture in the final piece.  The top left illustration of figure 5 will be the poster, and the other three designs will be variations of the poster.

Poster one (figure 6) was done in Photoshop.  This poster is my first choice of all four posters.  It is simple, and the message is clear.  We have all experienced an extrovert who can talk a lot at some point in our life, so most people can relate to this poster.

I used contrasting blue as a background and layered a paper texture over it.  I used a texture over the “Extrovert” stamp and a pencil texture on the black t-shirt.  The flowers were photographed from a greeting card, imaged traced in Adobe Illustrator and then coloured to my choice.

Poster Two is my variation of poster one.  It is the same concept, but his time, I added the narrative that the extrovert is talking so much that she is unaware of the alien ship in the garden.

This illustration was done in Adobe Illustrator and exported as a raster image (jpeg).

Poster 3 (figure 8) is another variation of the extrovert concept.  I used Adobe Illustrator to create the poster and exported it as a jpeg.  I used a cut-out of a clock and image traced it in Illustrator.  I am pleased with the result and will use this method with magazine photographs again in the future.  

The text was done with the pen tool, but next time I will do the text on paper and get it exactly how I want it and then scan it into Adobe Illustrator.  I tried to correct too many lines with the pen tool.

Poster four (figure 9) was also done in Adobe Illustrator.  I like the smooth lines I can get with the pen tool, especially for poster design.

I am overall happy with the four posters.  Using a limited colour palette forced me to look at other methods to create contrast and be strategic with the placing the elements in the poster.  I prefer the first two posters without the typography.  My lettering could be more cohesive with the illustration, especially the script lettering.  Next time I will be more mindful of drawing the lettering as part of the illustration.  

Works Cited

Adobe. (2023, February 8). Peach color: a warm and bright design option. Retrieved from Adobe: https://www.adobe.com/creativecloud/design/hub/guides/warm-and-bright-peach