In
the previous lesson,
we took a look at an overview of poster design.
In this lesson, we'll look at creativity,
the creative process,
and developing alternative design concepts.
For our final project,
I'm going to be developing a poster for a hypothetical exhibition of
Albers color experiments.
We'll be utilizing two of the color experiments we did earlier in the course
and combining them with typography to create two different poster concepts.
To begin that process of designing these hypothetical exhibition posters,
we're going to take a look at this book, The Universal Traveler,
and talk a little bit about the creative process and how you can get from an idea that's in your head
to sketches on paper,
and finally, to a digital rendering of the poster.
I was introduced to The Universal Traveler when I was in art school in the 1970s.
And as you can see from the cover,
it's a bit of a hippie book.
It definitely was a book for its time.
So we see in the cover the title,
The Universal Traveler, a soft systems guide to creativity,
problem solving, and the process of reaching goals.
And that's really what the book is all about.
It tells us how to get from A to Z in a very systematic way.
Now, you can imagine for someone from art school,
this is fairly revolutionary.
You know, we go into art school thinking about working intuitively,
but sometimes struggling.
So for me, this book was a way of formalizing how to get from point A to point Z
through the creative process.
The concept for this book is very interesting.
It looks at the creative process as a journey.
It kind of makes sense,
right, to go from point A to point Z through a series of steps or stages.
They use a map.
You can see my notations,
my underlining.
Now here's where it really gets interesting.
So we have the design process.
It's a problem solving journey.
And this book defined the creative process or the design process as a series of what they call energy states.
Each energy state informs the next in a very linear fashion,
so very easy to understand.
You start by accepting the situation.
As a student, you accept the assignment.
You say, yes, I understand what I'm going to do.
You analyze,
what is the assignment all about?
What do I need to do in order to accomplish it?
You define it.
You figure out specifically what you need to do.
What is the assignment really about?
You go deeper into it.
You ideate,
meaning to create alternatives,
right, to try different things.
So after you've accepted and analyzed and defined,
now you're coming up with alternatives.
In our case, that's going to be sketching.
Then you make a selection from those sketches.
You say, which one is best?
Which one do I want to take further?
And then you implement.
You execute.
You take your sketch,
and you turn it into a digital design.
And then finally, you evaluate.
You take a look at what you've done,
and you ask yourself,
have I reached the goals that I set out to reach?
Interesting, a little calendar page from 1977.
Here we see a map of the creative process.
We go from the acceptance of the situation,
to the analysis,
to the definition,
to the ideation, the selection, the implementation,
and back to the evaluation,
with side notes all the way through.
Here,
we get into something also very interesting.
We find out that the creative process,
the design process, is not purely linear,
but in fact,
can have a series of feedback loops.
So some people could say it's literally from going from A to Z in a linear fashion,
in a straight line.
Some people could see it as a circular form.
I'd like to see it as a series of feedback loops,
where you move from one energy state to another,
always with the possibility of going back,
and then going forward again, all the way to the end.
That's really defined my creative process.
It's how I work.
It's how I'm comfortable.
And this book gave me permission to think of it this way.
The book goes on to talk more about the creative process,
giving you tips about how to get through it.
But essentially, that's it.
So far, we've accepted our assignment.
We've analyzed it, and we've defined it.
We know what we're going to be doing,
using a color theory experiment
that we did earlier in the course,
combining that with typography to make a hypothetical
exhibition poster.
So now we're going to proceed to sketching,
making alternative design concepts.
What the Universal Travel called ideation.
I've got some tools with me today,
some color markers, because I'm going to be working in color,
and pencils.
I like to work with pencils.
It's comfortable.
I can make a mark,
and I can erase it if I want to.
But most of all,
I like the friction of the pencil on the paper.
I have many students now who work with Procreate,
who do all of their sketching on the computer.
I still prefer to do it old school.
So I know that this poster is going to be vertical format.
I know the elements that are going to be included,
so I can just start sketching that.
When I'm sketching, I'm basically drawing very roughly.
And I like to draw at a size where I'm comfortable.
I'm not just using my wrist.
I'm using my whole arm.
And I'm also looking back to those color experiments I did earlier,
and focusing on those ideas,
and try to implement them here in the sketch.
So one of the experiments we did was to make three colors look like two.
And you remember these experiments with compositions that were strictly side by side.
So my sketches are going to simply be compositions of those ideas.
And then down below,
I'm going to put in some very basic little squiggles
to suggest the idea of typography.
Something like that.
And just to think about some terminology back here.
Now this structure that I've just sketched out
is very classic poster design.
It has an image on the top.
It has some type on the bottom.
And it's based on a center axis.
Couldn't get more simple than that.
And there's nothing wrong with this at all.
Most posters we see on the street,
if you walk around New York City,
you look at a bus shelter,
oftentimes we'll have that same exact compositional strategy.
A center axis,
image on top, type on the bottom.
An alternative,
again, just thinking about that same proportion.
Alternative might be to say,
well, rather than having it like that,
exactly like that,
becomes asymmetrical.
And I also remember that some of my compositions,
some of my color experiments,
had connections.
So now I pushed the image on the top to the side.
It's now bleeding off one side over here.
Now the typography is free to move around as well.
Does not have to be centered anymore.
And so just as an idea,
I'll pick up on the center line.
Now my typography can exist over here.
Something like that, just as an alternative.
There are two different approaches to look at.
Try a couple more.
What happens if now,
if instead of having these rectangles
be in an X and Y alignment,
in other words, perpendicular or parallel to the edges,
I say, well, what happens if they're actually on an angle?
Again, thinking of that as a connection.
Just putting a little bit of detail into this.
And seeing again,
where does this lie?
Now this idea of putting things on an angle,
that goes back to the Bauhaus and to a particular
kind of design that's related to Russian constructivism.
Now look at the difference between these compositions up here.
Very straight, very horizontal, very stable,
right?
As soon as you move the picture,
the image, to the side and have it bleed off,
you lose a little bit of that stability.
No longer equal amounts of negative space on either
side, top and bottom.
Now the type is shifted to the side,
more asymmetrical use of negative space.
And then down here,
when we take the image and the typography and we place it on an angle,
we're kind of disrupting everything.
We're saying the world is no longer like what it was.
And that's kind of what the constructivists and the Bauhaus designers were saying.
We're looking at the world and saying,
it's not all horizontal,
it's not all vertical.
We're not always in alignment to the ground.
Everything doesn't have to be perfectly horizontal and
vertical.
In fact, you can call attention to something by making it angled.
Now think about that.
If you walk down the street,
most of what we see is vertical and horizontal,
perpendicular to the ground.
So to see something on an angle calls attention to it.
It says, this is different.
One more idea.
Try a different angle.
Actually, I'll try something really dramatically different.
Just as if you were looking at something on a table,
you don't necessarily always look at things that are perfectly flat.
It's hard to dimensionalize.
If you're looking at something from an angle,
part of the composition is going to appear large and part small,
as if there's a vanishing point in the background.
Now the typography could even do something interesting too,
where the typography goes from large to small.
Maybe it bleeds in like that.
So four similar but different design concepts,
all for the same content.
Different things you can do.
I gave myself permission down here to do something that's different.
Gave myself a lot of permission over here to actually create space illusion by changing the way we perceive the picture plane.
It's no longer perfectly flat.
Now it's angled.
So as we mentioned,
we're developing two different poster concepts.
Two different designs.
And we'll be using two of different color theory experiments.
So in the first set of sketches,
I was using the experiments of making three colors look like two.
In this set of sketches,
we'll be working with the illusion of transparency and seeing how that goes.
So again, vertical format.
And to be honest,
if you wanted to work horizontally,
you could.
Although when I think of posters,
I think of mostly vertical format posters.
It's what fits into a bus shelter.
There are definitely posters that go into other situations that are horizontal,
but we'll stay vertical for now.
And in this case,
we're thinking about another one
of the color theory experiments,
the illusion of transparency.
So right away,
if you remember our experiments,
they did not follow the x and y-axis anymore.
They weren't aligned to the edges of the paper.
So I can go back to my center axis concept
of having things down in the middle of the page.
Maybe just think about overlappings
of rectangles that relates to that idea of a center axis
or something similar to a center axis.
Again, where these spaces on either side are relatively equal.
Space on top is probably the same.
And then the typography is going to exist down below.
And just as one idea,
I could have the typography
do a similar kind of stair step.
That the two images are doing.
I'm going to keep working now just with composition.
We'll come back to color later.
Now think again about a different way of formalizing this idea using x and y-axis.
This time bleeding the rectangles off the edges of the page.
This time also moving some of the typography up to the top.
And having some at the bottom.
Keep going.
Now thinking back to some of the transparency exercises
where we weren't using a perpendicular relationship to the edge.
Where the rectangles are angled.
And thinking more asymmetrically.
And thinking about two parts to the image,
two parts of the typography.
And one more.
And in this last one,
I'll give myself even more permission
to be more abstract.
Maybe in this case,
the typography
is also playing off the angles.
And maybe becoming a part of the color illusion by overlapping the picture planes.
So again, you know, just trying different things out.
The one thing about sketching is that you can try
things out very quickly.
If I did this in the computer,
I'd be lost.
Within 30 seconds, I'd be into something so deep that I couldn't get out.
Whereas if I'm sketching,
I can make decisions very quickly.
Try things out very quickly.
Go on to the next thing very quickly.
Work out a lot of details that would take me
a lot longer on the computer to work out.
And also be a little bit too precise and too locked in.
This allows me to be very fluid, very free.
So now I'm going to apply some very quick color
to these sketches.
And I'm going to use my paint markers.
Start with some greens.
And just start to think about how colors might interact in different ways.
And I have a light green.
Darker green.
And look for a middle green that's in between these two,
which I may or may not have here.
Might have to darken up one of these greens.
See what happens.
Typography.
Might also have that same coloring.
And then just put a neutral gray into the background.
I'm not going to get the same exact color illusion effects.
But I'm going to get a basic idea of what this might look like.
So I'm going to go ahead and color in the rest of these.
There it is.