Poster Project

Design Strategy:

My poster is for my church’s youth benefit auction that is held every year. The proceeds all go towards the mission trips that the youth group takes. My youth pastor did not give me any limitations as far as design, and he was very flexible with content as well as long as the typical important information was included somewhere.

I felt that my headline would be a good place to start with this project. I came up with “from [the] auction block to [the] city block” to start out, so I tried to brainstorm images that could represent that. However, the ideas I came up with were too literal so I changed my route and instead used the headline “com-mission,” focusing on the verse from Matthew 28:19 that talks about the Great Commission, which is to do missions work. I thought the definition-style headline I made would help explain the whole idea behind the Great Commission.

I wanted to make the poster something a viewer could relate to; even if they aren’t able to go on mission trips themselves, they can still see ways to support those who do go on missions. I thought that photos of students on mission trips I’ve been on would be the best way to bring that idea home to the viewer. The scrapbook sort of theme was also an attempt to make the poster more “down-to-earth” and relatable.

Since my background is sort of a cardboard-handmade paper sort of texture instead of white space, I wanted to make sure that the printing margins didn’t make the rest of the page look out of place. To solve this problem I mimicked the Polaroid photo ideas to make the entire poster framed like a Polaroid would be.

I scanned in my background and the ripped white paper pieces.

Choice of Typefaces:

The only typeface I used was Constantina. I wanted a font that looked official since the top of my layout resembled a dictionary entry, but I also wanted something a little quirky since the theme of my poster is sort of like a scrapbook and kind of looks a little cut out and hand-pasted together. I did mix up the typeface sizes throughout the layout. I thought it added to the homemade feel of the poster by making the letters not a standard size. I used bold for the headline and the title of the event.

Color:

My poster is mostly “dry” tones – brown background, black text, and white paper. I didn’t want to use full-color photos because I wanted them to fit this theme, so I sort of spot-colored them and made the rest of the photo grayscale or at least dimmed. I really like how this turned out, with each photo sort of bringing out a different color. I also colored the word “mission” in “commission” with a faded red to make it stand out.

Paper:

I am using regular weight paper because of production costs.