"A Blank Poster has a lot of potential
— which is why every week we create posters based on a randomly generated word. The word works as the only common guideline for all participants and there are no judges so everyone is free to interpret the brief in their own way. The goal is to have a nice break from busy things and to be able to exercise creativity without restrictions."
Blank Poster: http://blankposter.com/
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Below are some of my entries to this cool design-exercise/movement. More will be added as I make more posters for new words.
So Much Fun
The word here was "fun" - I found it an interesting choice, one that can be used in an ironic, sarcastic, black-comedy sense. So I decided to use it to reflect a situation which expressed this - employees working in cramped workplaces which force them to operate in separate cubicles, limiting their interactions and creative explorations and allowing their bosses to easily watch them work. What's even more interesting is the fact that these office models have been used for decades to supposedly increase productivity when the sense of being "monitored from above" which they offer actually makes working difficult and uncomfortable.
From a designer perspective, I saw that if I would work in such a place, it would be "so much fun" — not.
http://blankposter.com/portfolio_category/fun/
Trials
Final poster
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A Dark Day for Graphic Designers
The word was "dark" and the idea for this one was to use the word in a metaphorical sense, rather than the common literal sense. I actually ended up combining both!
In creating this poster, I was simply making a big graphic-design faux-pas; creating a poster which combined several fonts (for no valid reason, and with the inclusion of the much despised Comic Sans font); as well as broke "rules" of visual harmony by cutting out letters, putting sentences in inaccessible places and making slight changes in the sizes of "a" and "day for graphic designers" (again, simply to be more provoking) as well as slanting and messing up the kerning of the latter phrase.
A dark day for graphic designers indeed.
http://blankposter.com/portfolio_category/dark/
Hit
The idea was to show the feeling and action which naturally comes along with a "hit", a physical blow. I wanted to show this in a literal, ironic sense, by stretching and distorting the word's letters - as if the word itself were suffering from a fatal hit.
http://blankposter.com/portfolio_category/hit/
Just a few of the trials I did, experimenting with various color combinations to make sure the ones I choose would be seen by different people, in a kind of universal sense, as matching (I love putting colors together that don't "match" in the traditional sense so it was kind of a hard little task).
Final Poster
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Match
Match is an interesting word, has various meanings - the wooden stick we light a stove with, a (football or other sports) game, a harmonious combination. I decided to play on the last because I felt that most people wouldn't have it in mind when creating their posters and I found it to be an interesting word to try to visualize, and so, I brainstormed for a few minutes and then decided to go for a very minimal approach: "matching" solid planes of color in a moving image form (the GIF).
/// Thanks for watching! Feel free to press the pretty blue button below if you like what you see! ///
Thank you.
