Design Principles- Museum Poster

 

For this brief we had to create an A1 poster that you could fold down into A4, the concept I had was that I could fold this down into an origami frog as featured on the poster, however this was too ambitious a task particularly as I was unfamiliar with origami techniques as this frog was my first attempt into this however I had had help from my Dad who likes to think he's a pro.  

Researching History Museum posters I found most designs were really simplistic and used a minimal variety of colours. I really like the latter where the text becomes apart of the imagery, I aimed in my poster to incorporate these elements and have the focal point on these two with no cluttered background to act as any kind of distraction.

The content was just a basic museum poster format, including the dates, title and location. In terms of format I wanted the typography to fill the spaces, making the most of the larger paper dimensions. The type I felt therefore not only looked like it was part of this miniature landscape I've created, but it's large and intimidating, due to the nature of the condition Ranidaphobia whereby people have a fear of frogs. Therefore the lack of kerning and general space in the poster is meant to be symbolic of this kind of suffocation created when fear arises, this sense of being trapped I hope is clear. 

In terms of colour scheme, I used colours featured in the mini scene I created, favouring a darker murky green for the header font which I feel works well as anything brighter would appear too friendly as the connotations of green are often earthy, natural, reliable. I wanted maintain the earthy, nature connotations but by darkening it it not only looks more like the typical colour of a frog, but also appears less friendly which obviously this condition is not meant to be.

My final design was an alteration from the first as I was initially unsure about the garish yellow background, I thought initially as it clashed so much with the murky green heading and I thought it I should feature one of the colours featured on the duvet in the imagery, so I chose the yellow, then linking it to the Yellow Banded Poisonous Dart Frog as I thought it was particularly relevant especially as this gives the fear of frogs a reasoning, as this yellow colour is representative of poison. 

However upon reflection it didn't seem appropriate for the context of the Natural History Museum, and for me the text didn't look right on that vibrant background so I wanted to strip it back like the posters I'd seen whilst researching. The final outcome is cleaner and more suitable. The sense of fear is more subtly portrayed through the text rather than the background which was more of an eye sore.