paul stanton

Project Overview

The brief for this project was to create a design that contained all the necessary information to advertise an upcoming concert and execute that design across three different common advertisement form factors.

Process

The design had to be legible at all three sizes. So I decided to start with the size that presented the most problems of legibility: the billboard.

People read billboards while traveling by in cars out of their peripheral vision, so you can’t put too much information on them. But you don’t need to. For contemporary artists, everyone looks up the details of the concert online. What the poster needs to do is communicate the act, the time, the place, and where to find out more. I tried to communicate this in as few words as possible, while not sacrificing comprehensibility.

Minimal text on the poster led to a clean-feeling design focusing on the personalities of the artists being advertised.

For the bus stop poster, I felt I had a little more creative freedom, as people tend to spend longer with bus stop ads than the other form factors. Diggs and Casal have often played up the contrasting parts of their personalities in their stage personas, acting as each others foils. Reflecting them across the ampersand visually depicts this artistic tension.

Reflection & Takeaways

Looking back on this piece, I think the overall design is good, but I have one major critique: the typography.

I don’t think the typeface I chose is correct for this application. It’s makes the names look very aesthetically pleasing, but is slightly too stylized for the main copy, where legibility should always be the priority. If I were designing this today I would chose something wider and heavier with less contrast.

This piece showcases one of the principals I apply to everything I design: that finished work should contain everything that is necessary to communicate the desired message to the viewer/user and nothing else.

Blaise Pascal once wrote: “I apologize for such a long letter—I didn’t have time to write a short one.” It takes quite a few drafts to create a design refined enough to communicate its message simply.