One from my reject pile, please help me understand what went wrong.

PistolPete

Member


As mentioned elsewhere, I have set myself a challenge to design a poster a week for an open mic night I run during 2017.

This is one I've not been able to get right. I think the idea is solid, but the final product doesn't feel as it should. I'd love to hear your thoughts.
 
Looks ok to me, apart from the unusual landscape format. Not keen on TO on its own line.
Maybe make the colours a bit brighter, the background redder maybe, it's a wee bit 'beige'.
 
It doesn't offend me.

Landscape is a little awkward for a poster.
The spacing on the "TO" draws my eye though.
Maybe close it up and add a couple of scrolls to either side?
 
It's not just the word 'T O' the kerning overall needs fixing, look at the 'A' and 'U' in 'VA UALTS' for example.
The problem with this poster is that is it not a poster, or at least it is not doing the job of a poster. Yes the unusual landscape origination does not help but overall, it is something I would not pay any attention to, I'd walk by without a second thought. A poster should grab the viewers attention, draw the person in, be authoritative and commanding. As mentioned above, the colours are not helping with this either. The guitar looks too textured. The font choice screams of a Wild Wild West bar. Not only does the kerning need seeing to, but the leading too.
 
It's landscape which you don't often see. And colours, the acoustic guitar and the Mesquite-style font gives the impression of a country and western night. Most importantly the text containing the details of the night is hard to read and honestly a little ugly. I've personally never been a fan of the trend of increasing the size of different words in order to align to the edge of a column as it often gives unnecessary emphasis to unimportant words (such as 'to' in your design).

I'd look at doing something a bit like this to make the text look more exciting;

dear_typography_poster_final.jpg

(source: https://warrenfrank.wordpress.com/2011/10/22/bdc-192-week-7-typography/)
 
You need something with more punch, actually it's not really inviting and between us the goal of this poster is clearly to invite people no? Deformation of the text looks a little bit strange to me. It is a deformation or maybe hand lettering here??

mic.png
 
Thank you all for taking the time to respond.

The wild west thing wasn't entirely accidental given the pub where I run my open mic specialises in burgers & Americana-y music, although I was thinking 'carnival' when I chose that font rather than 'OK corral'.

I felt the choice of landscape might work better with the key idea of the text cascading down the side of the guitar (which was done with the warp tool btw @Athos).

With your comments on board I had a play around with the layout, let me know if you think any of these are better.

 
Sometimes when your key idea doesn't work it's always good to explore another way. The old paper effect works fine but the visual is too light. Think about the important things onto you poster Title / date / where does it takes place. A kind of hierarchy to help you understand what is the different key elements to put forward. It's important for US to record this information after a first look. At this stage, you poster doesn't promote the event.

keep working!
 
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