I thought about what the word carnival meant pretty hard. My first reaction was to create a piece of work around Notting hill carnival which I really enjoy, but my instinct told me it was a little to obvious to work with. So I delved a bit deeper into the purity of the word and decided it was more about a celebratory event or sense within man. I could think of no better example of age old carnival tradition worldwide than lunar, solstice and general rare space calendar events. They go back in history with a huge degree of importance throughout so many races and nations it felt like it carried the correct degree of importance. On a more personal level they had importance to me because I have had a great time at the summer solstice event at Stonehenge in the past, aswell as the total lunar eclipse in 1999 taking place on my birthday which really captivated me as a child.
Initially I looked some really nicely done art deco/Russian constructionist style promotional posters for the movie black swan in relation to what i was going to create as my posters. I tried a few things inspired by this but didn't really feel it worked that well so looked for another source of reference.
I like designing posters so wanted to create a series of posters promoting different events. I remember seeing a particularly beautiful poster at the V&A for the cactus house at Kew gardens which really stuck with me and I thought it might be nice to follow the style the poster was produced in for the creation of this project. It was designed in the 20's and had a kind of timeless feel about it so I thought doing something similar would be fairly appropriate.
These are the sketches which I initially did for the preliminary design of the poster. In the sketch I've tried to use a similar structure of the bordered image and type formatting. They show the carnival in full swing with the Stonehenge stones included. Maybe this would have worked out kinda nice if i had art-worked it similarly to the Kew poster but in the end I felt that again this was a little too obvious. Why show an image of the carnival on a poster for the carnival? It wouldn't be engaging, it would require a second look, any attention paid to to. No, what this needed was a totally relevant but really different visual which would catch people off guard and make them look closer at the campaign.
I had the thought that it could actually be very nice to design a series of scientific diagrams which served to explain what was actually happening in the solar system to create the calendar event, but which was also a beautiful and interesting piece of artwork worthy of being the visuals for a poster campaign. I felt it dealt with the theme perfectly; precise and totally relevant for each but not obvious or repeated as a visual. Imagery of people having fun and dancing on posters for festivals was so overused and cliché it just felt like a total no go area. My early sketches felt like a recycled idea.
But could it be done? I had always thought that actually the scientific diagrams of the solar system were really cool things to look at but could do with perhaps some more artistic flare in the design. Even just with the benefit of some complementing colour schemes with a stripped down approach could tackle the issue in a way which was very visually pleasing. I did some research into the actual diagrams which explained why each of my three events happened and began stripping down unnecessary clutter and building back up a structured good looking diagram.
My inspiration for the visual aesthetic of the posters actually came from looking at some really nice 50's jazz record sleeves from Blue note. They have always really captured my imagination with bold and confident use of both shape and colour, something which always appeals to me in design. I borrowed some elements of these covers for use in my new diagrams.
I made the decision that all the labels for the diagrams should be hand written in a way which harked back to our school days in a kind of purposefully scrawled 'professors' handwriting style. I think this works really well and is much more effective than typography. The type is Akzidenz bold which I thought fit it pretty well. I'm still kind of winging my way through using type so I appreciate that it may not be perfect or quite right.
anyway these are the finished posters that I ended up with:
I did actually then take the diagrams and try to make a magazine article out of them but this failed pretty badly. I think I could do a much better job of this later in the year but at this stage I wasn't prepared, although I did learn a lot by doing it. My posters were much stronger I think now.
