Design Insights: Air is Power [repost]

August 13, 2010

Note: this is a repost from my previous blog that mysteriously broke. This post was posted on July 8, 2010.

This post kicks off an ongoing series I’m going to call Design Insights. As a student, doubt I have much insight to give, but I always enjoyed seeing the process of how something like a poster or a movie was made, so I thought it would be fun to occasionally show off how some of my work was created. Sometimes everything just falls into place; other times the creative process can be really convoluted.

For the premiere of Design Insights, I’ve decided to focus on my Air is Power poster. First, some background information. It was created for an assignment I had in my Intermediate Graphic Design class at San Jose State University. It was the first of four graphic design projects that followed a renewable energy theme (the remaining three I will probably cover in future Design Insight posts). For this poster, I had to select a general aspect of renewable energy and promote it in an 11×17″ poster. “Energy Foundation” and the URL for their website was the only required copy. While other copy was not discouraged, the point of the project was not to create something that required a lot of reading. Instead, the poster should pique the viewers’ interest and encourage them to visit the Energy Foundation website.

I always found the image of a tri-blade wind turbine very striking, and so early on I decided to focus on wind power for my poster. Looking back, I wonder if that was the best choice, because a significant portion of the rest of the class also thought the wind turbine was the best image to focus on in their poster. Oh well.

Anyway, this poster went though many versions. While the turbine was always the focus on the poster, it’s size, position and coloring was tweaked constantly. I even started out with an actual photo of a wind turbine at first, but quickly switched to a vector illustration I created from scratch.

One of my earlier versions featured a night scene with bright Art Deco spotlights shiny out from behind the turbine. I liked the look, but eventually I was convinced by my classmates and teacher that the poster was stronger without the searchlights. Once the searchlights were removed, I changed the poster to a “daytime” setting and focused on streamlining the type.

I was encouraged to get the type to interact with the turbine. First I floated the type above the turbine as if the type was a cloud, but then I decided to actually make the “Air is Power” type becomethe air. After much fiddling around with placement, angles and transparency, I reached the final product.

One note about the type: For the body type, I went with Helvetica, because it is hard to go wrong with Helvetica. For the display type, I chose Avenir. I originally considered Futura, but I had already used Futura for several earlier projects, and I didn’t want to box myself in with one typeface.

I hope this examination of the creative process to create my Air is Power poster was at least a little interesting and fun. Larger versions of any of the images in this post can be seen by clicking on them (takes you off site to my Flickr account). Stay tuned for some more Design Insights, and other random ramblings!

Posted in Design Insights, Graphic Design, Posters, School