Created during Design 376: Advanced Typography at the University of Washington.
This poster was created to promote the event “Rhizomes,” a two week dance workshop for preschoolers hosted by the French cultural center L’Alliance NY. The workshop intends to promote and develop key social, motor, and developmental skills in the children participating through an exploration of dance movements and art created and inspired by physical plant material. For this project, I was required to use the font “Phylum,” created by UW Design Alum Burke Smithers.
PROCESS
Because the event is rooted in child development yet incredibly whimsical in nature, I knew my greatest challenge was going to be finding an appropriate balance between those two qualities when making my poster. I began my process by sketching typographical explorations of the concept of Rhizomes.
From these initial sketches, I began iterating on Illustrator. At this point, I was far from my final version and still being quite conservative in my design approach. As a result, I feel that a lot of the typography is underdeveloped and everything I was creating was far too flat. However, these iterations laid the groundwork for further physical exploration.
Since I believed my previous explorations to be far too flat and underdeveloped, I decided to take a near 180 in my approach and get extremely physical with my process. I thought, if the ethos of this workshop is for preschoolers to discover the world around them and get their hands dirty, shouldn’t the poster reflect that? I printed out the words “Rhizomes” and related event information and spent a lot of time collaging together plant material and scanning it. These iterations much more closely inspired my final and helped me learn a lot about my own preferences in my design process.
These explorations led me to create my final base for my poster. For my final, I pasted and arranged roots underneath the letters that make up the word “Rhizomes” and scanned my collage. I then created a second page of leaves layered and arranged around each other and scanned that. After that, I layered the two images over each other multiple times in varying levels of opacity to create a complex yet beautiful amalgamation of roots and leaves. From there, I was able to focus my attention on how I would arrange the typography over the already complex image I created.
As a bonus, here are some photos from working on this poster!
An early version of the typographical treatment on my final poster.The absolute mess I was making on my kitchen island! You can see the leaves I ended up using in my final in the large mason jar to the left.Making the word Rhizomes out of roots.An early idea I had to print leaves onto paper–unfortunately, the result was too featherlike to be appropriate for my event.An exploration in how I could possibly make a typographical collage of the words I wanted to work with on my poster.A lot of beheaded flowers for an idea I had to make the word Rhizomes out of them! I found their form too bulky to work with successfully for this purpose.