Poster Design

This project was one my favorites of all time. 

To provide some context, this assignment was from a class I took at UC Berkeley called "Visual Communication and Sketching," and it taught me how to be more visually sensitive for the information and message that is to be conveyed through a design one may create. The purpose of this project was to find an example of "bad" visual design and recreate it using all of the principles we learned in that module, such as:

• visual hierarchy

• lining things up

• typography

• color usage

The images presented here are a before-and-after (left, right) comparison of the design's progression. The original poster (left) was created for a Spring Recital at my mother's music school in Koreatown, Los Angeles, and the photo on the left is actually a square photo that was posted onto the music school's Instagram account (@yamahamusicschool_).

I used Didot typeface and placed the title of the event in the center for clear communication. I decided to blend the image of a piano in the background because the recital was specifically for piano performances. I purposely used colors that might evoke the sense of the spring season, and I thought the alpha mask of text with the flowers would add an extra dimension to the message and information in the poster.

The name of the music school was placed on the bottom right for credibility and official purposes. (But let me talk about the expression of it): I put the text of "Young Artists' Yamaha Music School" in right-aligned because our professor told us in class that placing text as right-aligned was frequently hard to pull off, but I thought,"ok, bet" so I went and did it anyway. It was a bit of creative rebellion, but I received positive feedback on it, it was one of the most encouraging things I had heard in a very long time.

More about this project

My inspiration for the redesign was from the bold and iconic visuals on Harper's Bazaar covers. Contrary to popular culture, I really love looking at magazines; I think my execution of this was directed toward mixing visual and tangible experiences.

The client (Young Artists' Yamaha Music School, aka my mom) loved this design and asked for it to be brought to life in a large poster. To accommodate for this request, I went back to the original design and scaled it in Adobe InDesign for print. (photo on the right)

A detail I would really like to share is that there were 4 other posters I designed for this assignment. I was so tired from staring at my computer forever and making different interpretations of the same message; but I also remember not being fully satisfied with my work.

Although I was tired and felt like wrapping things up that night, I remember telling myself,"Hm. I really want to have fun with this," and the winning piece was ultimately the one I took a creative risk on. (Honestly, I just made this one for shits-and-giggles, and I just thought to submit it because I was curious to see a reaction to it.)

The final design was the one that made me feel most proud of myself as a "designer," but I really hope I can someday have the confidence to say, I am a designer.