Studio Brief 5, Message and Delivery

When I began to design my posters from my research I knew I was going to have a jokey humorous tone in it. I am aiming my posters at men who suffer from male pattern baldness. To me this is a very normal thing that men should not be embarrassed by or upset about.

When I began researching the posters I had a strong idea of what kind of composition I wanted. The brief was to create a high impact poster and I instantly thought of these two. They're bold in colour and type and have a very clear simple message, which is what I wanted to create. 
I think posters work well if they have a catchy slogan on them.

I also looked at Saul Bass because I quite like his designs, they're normally quite simple with interesting illustrations. I think it's quite interesting that the posters I was drawn to use red a lot but when it came to my own posters I didn't like it and they didn't work.

I began with the slogans because I like thinking of puns or catchy slogans, however my first attempt were very weak and not very funny. A lot of the people I asked didn't really get them.

I found it really hard thinking of pure image posters because they needed to communicate my message separately from the other posters. Again my first attempts weren't good and wouldn't work with the two colour rule.
I asked my table for feedback and ideas which was really helpful because they gave me the idea of having a very simple image rather than trying to cram loads of ideas visually in a small layout.


The image and text was also still a bit of struggle but was easier because this way I could have a funny slogan and an image that supports the words. I went through quite a lot of ideas with this trying to make the image not too complicated and to match the words.

I thought of colour schemes I had seen work together like orange and purple (ADD ALEC POSTER PHOTO), or black and red. When I showed this to the crit group a lot of people were in favour of black and red because the posters are aimed at men, which I agreed with.

After the crit I had a very clear idea of which posters I was going to produce and what colours. I went through a range of different compositions, working with the 2:1 layout. I chose 400mm by 20mm so I could have quite an elongated portrait poster which I think creates a more high impact poster.

I quickly worked out that red would not work within my posters because I just couldn't get it to look good, I think it looks too bold and cheap.

I worked with black and white which I think works a lot better because it's clear clean and bold, which adds to the high impact. I tested out both ways of using black and white and decided that white text and image on black was the stronger look.

 Final Outcome