3 Approaches to Poster Design

 

I chose these three posters because despite a similar goal and framework, they still manage to be completely different from one another. The main thing that all of these have in common is their use of image. In every single one, the image is the thing that catches the eye and encourages the audience to interact with the poster more.  It takes up most of the poster  and it will leave the biggest impression. So what separates them from one another? I think that the answer is determined by target audience first and foremost. I have ordered them from most broad to most niche. 

The first poster is an advertisement for a national park area - specifically a cave. It has a very limited color palette. Not only is it exclusively yellow and blue, but there are only 5 individual hues total. The text is not exempt from this and uses the same colors. This creates a poster that looks like one large illustration. The image used is a simple illustration, but highlights the beauty of the place being advertised. This poster is meant to appeal to everybody who comes across it because national parks have a target audience of everyone. 

The hierarchy is interesting because it's a bit subtle. "Jewel Cave" is noticeably larger than the rest of the text, but it's a very gradual shrinking from there. It's also at the bottom of the page, yet is the first text you are meant to read. This is achieved by the size, but also because the big clump of text at the bottom is larger than the thinner one on the top. The order of importance is the name of the cave, that it's a monument, who is in charge of it, a specific thing that can be done there, and some features that the cave has. Your eye goes to the middle, bottom, and then top. 

There are some questionable choices here, mainly that the logo separates text; some of it is supposed to be read over the logo and some is not, which is confusing. One thing that does work is the way the tracking was done. It's really obvious that it was done on the bottom, yet I don't think that I would notice if I wasn't looking for it. The font itself is used in a lot of different stretchy variations that it doesn't necessarily look out of place.

Despite being the most detailed image, I would say that this approach to poster design is the most basic (not in a bad way). You're going to see a movie, so the priority is to get people excited to watch something. You don't usually get someone excited to watch something by having them read a lot of words, so text is used sparingly. The image shows you what's in the movie and what you should be excited to look at. The only information you're given is the title and the names of the most famous actors in it. 

Movie posters appeal to people who like a certain genre. While it's ideal to attract a wider audience, there is a lot of emphasis on communicating what kind of movie this is going to be. The cyberpunk aesthetic is communicated right away for example. In terms of hierarchy the name of the movie is in large text in a unique font at the bottom and the names of the actors are in smaller, but still large text in the top corners. I don't see any use of kerning or tracking, just because "Ryan" is so much closer together than the other names. The title is completely custom to the title, so it likely wouldn't need any tweaking. 

The last example is a poster for a music festival. These posters almost always look like this because there's a large emphasis put on cramming a lot of information onto a page in a way that looks wacky. The legibility isn't as much of a concern because they're not trying to sell people on anything so much as they're trying to attract people who are already fans of the attending bands. They're appealing to an existing audience that they already have to work with. Since so many of these posters look this way, even from a distance it's going to be clear to most people what kind of thing it's advertising. The title of the whole thing is used as word art.

The most important information is the dates, which are given priority by being in a much thicker font and not being included in the crammed paragraph. The most well-known or anticipated bands are put in order. The more important they are, the more interesting the font is and the larger it is. By the time you get to the bottom the text becomes a lot smaller and is in a more recognizable font that can be read at that size.