Project 2-- Poster (Matt Colon)

(As a sidenote, the image is appearing a much lighter black than it actually is, in the real version the black rectangle around the logo in the lower right is not visible, as it matches the background)

When it came to the poster design, the first possibility I considered was the Ridgefield Music and Arts Center, a nonprofit organization from my hometown that promotes various art forms, including music, by holding free concerts, art shows, poetry slams, etc. Being a musician, I’ve worked with RMAC in the past and am good friends with the person whose mother is the head of the entire operation. As such, I was able to get very good information and due to my past experience with the organization, I knew exactly how to go about designing a poster for one of their events.

There is a free concert being held on October 18^th at the RMAC building consisting of local high school bands, solely for the purpose of promoting the organization and providing a fun social gathering spot. Therefore, I knew the audience I was trying to reach was high school kids, or just anybody who likes rock concerts. To that end, I knew I wanted to design the poster around a symbolic image of rock music, and partially for the sake of ease, I decided to use my guitar for the image. I took several pictures of it, found the best one, and did some tweaking with Photoshop and Illustrator to do things such as get rid of the strings going down the body of the guitar, to make way for more easily legible type, etc.

The design I ended up choosing was the simplest, yet also the most dramatic. The neck of the guitar leads from the headline at the top to the information about the event, drawing the eye down, and at three relatively evenly interspersed locations the type is in red, providing good eye-stops. The color palette I chose is very simple and modern—black, white and red are the only colors in the entire thing. I hoped the stark contrast between the white and black of the guitar would help draw the eye to it. To continue the modern theme, I used only sans serif font, Gill Sans MT, except for the word “ROCK” which I put in IronwoodStd, which had just the “heavy metal” theme that the guitar was bringing out. For visual hierarchy I made sure the important words were larger or defined somehow—“ready” is in italics, “ROCK” is obviously in the crazy font, “FREE CONCERT” is in bold caps, and the information about the event is in smaller type, since at that point anyone interested would continue reading. And I cap it off with a small suggestion to donate to RMAC, using the logo on the lower right, where the reader’s eye leaves. I am in advertising, after all.