Visual Hierarchy
Tuesday, September 7
Exercise 1: Stroke Weights
In this exercise, I learned:
- Weights that are immediately next to each other (45/55, 55/65, etc) are too similar to really be distinguishable unless you’re up super close to it
- Heavier weights draw more attention, even if they’re used more often — lighter headers and heavier body don’t really work
- The heavier weight lines read as the beginning of a section, so if I put it in the middle or the end, then information from the next event appears to be part of that one.
Exercise 2: Linespacing
In this exercise, I learned:
- Splitting up information about the same event makes it difficult to perceive as the same event
- Line breaks work similarly to heavier text weight in that they both seem to delineate new sections, so they shouldn’t be placed in the middle of an event in order to prevent miscommunication
Exercise 3: Two Margins
In this exercise, I learned:
- Indents can work in either direction — I didn’t think having headers further indented than copy would read well, but I actually think it can be fine.
- However, just as with line breaks and bolder weights, putting an indent in the middle of a chunk of connected information breaks that connection.
- Deeper indents provide more contrast and therefore are easier to read, because you know where to go more clearly and it gives your eyes more of a break.
Exercise 4: Three Margins
In this exercise, I learned:
- Three margins… aren’t really necessary, at least for this set of information
- Again, header indents work in either direction, which was surprising to me
- There has to be some kind of visual distinction between the events — the first example doesn’t have any and it just doesn’t work at all.
Exercise 5: Linespacing & 2 Stroke Weights
In this exercise, I learned:
- Even with an additional way to display contrast, inserting line breaks between information for the same event impedes legibility
- Heavier line weight headers become redundant when there are line breaks in the same places
- This works well to emphasize information like the author or book title, which doesn’t come first in the chunk of info but might be more important, while keeping separate events clear.
Exercise 6: Two Stroke Weights + Horizontal Shift(s)
In this exercise, I learned:
- Again, three columns aren’t necessary for this amount of information
- In example 2, margins and bold are competing for the “header” position and it’s not very clear which information goes with what.
- The final 2 examples seem to work better — the indented information clearly goes with the line on the first margin, and then the bold serves to either emphasize the author or the book.
Right now I’m trying to decide whether to emphasize the author or the book title. Personally, for my own projects, I think I would emphasize the book title. I’ve heard of (and remember) the title The Vanishing Half, but I didn’t remember that the author’s name was Brit Bennett. I, personally, would be more excited about going to a talk about The Vanishing Half than a talk by Brit Bennett, even if they were literally the same talk. However, since this is a lecture series, and especially because Pittsburgh Arts & Lectures seems to be doing it this way, I think I’ll emphasize the speakers. When looking at their website, they list their “Ten (Five) Evenings” by speakers and don’t even include lecture titles at all.
Friday, September 10
I played around with scale a lot yesterday. Here are some of the compositions I came up with. (The last 3 are my favorites.)
I brought the final three into Illustrator, but I changed the content slightly. Because I wanted to emphasize the speakers most, I switched the titles and the authors in the leftmost example, and the dates and the authors in the second example. I also changed a few other things to fit a bit better, and came up with these.
(“Celebrated authors sharing their creative process” is a shortened version of the Ten Evenings tagline that I found on their website.)
These still need tweaking — the way “Pittsburgh Arts & Lectures” gets cut off in the first example is creating some weird tangents, and I think it looks funny that only one thing extends off the page in the second example. But I thought these were good enough to move on to color!
I tried three color schemes: one analogous, one monochromatic, and one complementary.
I noticed that colors that were more contrasting stood out more. For example, in the bottom right where I have the large author names in blue and the smaller text in cream, it creates this weird sense of tension and you’re not sure where to look, because the text with the most color contrast is not the text with the most scale or weight contrast. The example immediately to its right is better — the headers are in cream, which is most contrasting with the background color, and the overall message is clearer.
I tried out gradients in the back of some of them, but I’m not sure how I feel about them. I think they work quite nicely in the analogous color scheme option, but not so much in the complementary one (I think adding brown into that mix might not have been the best choice).
Here are my favorites from playing around with color! I tended to like lighter text on a darker background, but that may just be me — I’ll need to get other opinions to see whether they’re really better or if it’s a personal preference.
I used a different color scheme for each layout, but I think my next steps will be to try out each color scheme on each layout and consider how they work together, and decide which is most effective.
Tuesday, September 14
After today’s crit, I took away some big things to change in my layouts before moving on to images. I didn’t have enough white space in my designs, and moving to 11 by 17 helped with that, but I also made most of my text smaller and added margins rather than having the text stick off the page. Additionally, my colors weren’t doing anything to add to the hierarchy and clarity of my poster. Moving forward, I’m trying to use color in a way that adds to the helpfulness of my design, instead of just adding visual interest.
I went back to my layouts first, adjusting them to have more breathing room and to (try to) have Pittsburgh Arts & Lectures more prominent. In the leftmost poster, I tried to use color to solve the issue that came up in class today about not knowing what the events were for until very late in the reading process by calling attention to the smaller details. The rightmost poster is just a slight reworking of one of my layouts, with slightly smaller text so there’s more negative space, but I’m still not particularly excited by it. The middle three are all essentially the same layout, just slightly different. I took one of my previous layouts and switched the font weight, so the speakers’ names were less bold and the title of the organization was more prominent. I moved it up to the top, too, and tried out different alignments. I’m not sure which of those three I like best, and I also still like the leftmost one.
I then moved on to photos. The photo with the statue is actually a photo I took last year for Placing. I experimented with odd crops and rotations to try to replicate the concept of thinking differently/creatively/outside of the box, which I feel is the goal of the speaker series — to get people to see things from a different perspective. However, the colors of the photo make it a little tricky to read the poster, so that may require more Photoshop tooling around if I choose to go with it. The next photo (2nd and 4th) is simply an abstract one that I found on Unsplash, and while I really like those posters, I think the abstract, fluid lines in the imagery lend themselves more to dance or music than to literary lectures, so that might not be a winner either. The final photo I think worked quite well, actually. I modified my layout to fit next to the ladder, which I enjoy and might come back to if I choose not to go with the illustrations, which I’ll talk about next.
I wanted to try out illustrations, but I was having a hard time finding any that fit the tone of these events. Then I had the idea to include an older-style illustration that may have been in antique books! (After some digging, I found that “engraving” was a better search term, but I don’t really know much about that realm of art, so I just took what I could find.)
I’m really drawn to the grayscale ones of these, which wasn’t what I was expecting. (I’m not sure if we’re required to use color in our final posters.) I really like the feeling of these — the Neue Haas Grotesk contrasts nicely with the older feel of the background illustration (engraving) and, I think, echoes nicely the Five Evenings themselves as a nice combination of modernity and history. I tried including color on the left/right alternating alignment layouts like I did earlier to emphasize the smaller text, but it didn’t seem to work very well. I’ll have to try out more things later on. Unrelated to color or text, but maybe I’ll try including an engraving upside down as a callback to my earlier crop ideas…
I’m not sure which of these is my favorite, either, or if a different textual composition might work better. I still have a lot of experimenting to do, but I’m excited about the direction I’m heading in!
Thursday, September 16
After talking with Yoshi and Vicki about my posters, I took a slightly different tack. I scrapped the engraving idea (it felt too much like art history and not enough like literary lectures), and went back to my earlier concepts. Both Yoshi and Vicki said that my text didn’t need to be so big, so I scaled it all down a decent amount and then rearranged it slightly, varying the margins and making it a little more freeform. I also changed the names from being on the same line to being on two lines, because I felt that it helped visually distinguish the clusters better.
I decided to go with my statue photo, and rotated it and cropped it to fit my layout better. I also consolidated the logistical information down all into one section and made it really small, and put a shortened version of the Ten Evenings tagline up at the top. I tried out different colors in order to draw attention to that line, and yellow worked the best with that photo.
Then I took the photo into Photoshop to clean it up a bit for this poster. I removed a harsh shadow that was making “Brit Bennett” kind of hard to read as well as spot healing some other areas that were distracting. Then I went in to edit the color temperature of the photo. I felt that the original was too red, and looked odd with the yellow text. I made a version that matched the yellow more as well as a black and white version. Those both felt too extreme, so I then combined the desaturated look with the two different color temperatures and scaled it back a bit. I printed them all out and hung them up to compare them, and I think the desaturated version of the original is most effective.
(I did go back to CFA to try to reshoot the photo with less grain, but I liked the original better than any of my retakes and there wasn’t really less grain anyway.)
Sunday, September 19
I went back to CFA again to reshoot the photo at a different time of day to see if that helped, but I still preferred the original photo. It has a more even tone that I just wasn’t able to replicate, and everyone I talked to said they liked the grain (which means it wasn’t just me!). So I stuck to my original photo, and talked to Yoshi at office hours.
The main feedback I got was that there wasn’t a very clear entry point. He also said that the placement of the clusters was a little odd — not quite optical alignment, but not perfect grid either — and that the yellow tagline wasn’t something he would pay attention to. I rearranged a little bit based on our conversation and ended up with these two options.
I’m going to print them out this afternoon and see whether I like the subtitle in black or yellow better, and whether I prefer the website/other info like in version 1 or version 2. Then I’ll print my final.
Monday, September 20
After printing both versions, the one on the right was the clear winner. The black subtitle is easier to read & the different typesetting of the website & other info felt less awkward. I made a couple of changes — I moved the Charles Yu cluster and the Brit Bennett cluster closer to the edges of the page, and moved the website & info into the corner so it doesn’t look like it was supposed to be centered.
Tuesday, September 21
After seeing my poster up next to everyone else’s, I realized that none of my type was really eye-catching enough. I also decided to emphasize “Celebrated authors…” over “Pittsburgh Arts & Lectures.” I made Pittsburgh Arts & Lectures small and included it with the website and other info, and then I made “Celebrated authors…” larger, bold, and yellow. I also curved its alignment to line up with the arch in the photo and ideally direct the eye down towards the first author name.
I set “Celebrated authors” in 75 weight and the author names in 65. That way, the boldness of the type is still eye-catching, but the names aren’t competing with the title. To further push this, I changed all of the cluster type to be more of a gray-brown instead of a solid black. This slightly decreased its contrast with the photo and helped keep the main focus on “Celebrated authors.”
Overall, I’m really happy with the final product. Going through the process of designing this reminded me of what I learned about my own creative process last year—I tend not to think outside the box very much, and I don’t really experiment with new ideas once I’ve landed on something. Going forward, I’m going to focus more on ideation and experimentation, and especially trying new or weird things, even if they don’t end up contributing to my final design. I can still learn from them.
