For our first assignment in Graphic Design I, we were required to create several posters for the on campus film series "The Culinary and the Cultural." After refining my rough version, I ended up with this, based on J.D. Salinger's original bookcover design for Nine Stories. Both the original book cover and my poster design used a grid to further box the boxes. I removed my lines after critique, and I am starting to realize that most of the time, lines and boxes are a poor excuse for design. Stop Stealing Sheep and Learn Typography discusses how too many designers are worried text might fall off the page otherwise. It won't.
After our first poster, we chose an art director and created an overall series of posters with a unified theme. We chose a long strip of 35 mm film as our concept. I designed the template for the film and then began work on my individual poster for Eat Drink Man Woman.
I originally played with the idea of the obvious choice of having "EAT DRINK MAN WOMAN" in large letters and then added symbols for "eat", "drink", "man", and "woman" at the bottom. It was decided this was too obvious, so I opted to use the Mandarin symbols for eat, drink, man, and woman, which helps to emphasize the notion of the cultural aspect of the film series. I made the symbols on the bottom of the poster specific to the plot; the man became the father chef, the food became more Taiwainese inspired with added chopsticks, the drink became a teacup, and the woman became the three daughters. Working through the poster group as a series, we decided we would have more visual impact if every other poster was reversed, which is why I ended up with a back background and reversed text and image. I kept my typeface simple by sticking with Adobe Caslon, which was another unifying element of the poster series.
Here are some shots of our posters in action (click on the thumbail for a larger image):
