How Posters Work - A Deconstruction

Project description:

In an attempt to explore/exploit, some of the functions, tools, and processes of design software you will re-create/imagine* three (3) – or more – posters from Cooper Hewitt’s Smithsonian Design Museum permanent poster collection.

If you wish to explore posters outside the museum's collection feel free to do so. Make sure to identify and learn more about the maker, and share with the class if possible.

The posters you choose to work with, have to fall under different categories,** and share different visual characteristics.*** So for example, you can choose to work with a poster from the cut and paste category that focuses on collage, a poster from the simplify category that focuses on illustration, and a poster from the amplify category that focuses on typography.

This project is not meant as a recipe on how to create the >> best << poster. It is a project intended to teach you about how designers see. The works you are asked to re-create/imagine have mobilized principles of composition, perception, and rhetoric. Each poster enacts ways of thinking and making, and each poster wants to be seen. How do we look at graphic design, and how, in turn, does graphic design looks back at us? (paraphrased from How Posters Work by Ellen Lupton).

During the following weeks you will learn how to observe, analyze, and deconstruct works of others, and create your own interpretations of them. You will also learn how to utilize analog, and digital tools and processes in order to do so.

*
Your work does not (!) have to be an exact reproduction of the original poster, but rather pay tribute to the ways of thinking and making behind the process of creating such a poster.

**
Focus the Eye
Overwhelm the Eye
Simplify
Cut and Paste
Overlap
Assault the Surface
Activate the Diagonal
Manipulate Scale
Use Text as Image
Tell a Story
Double the Meaning
Amplify
Make Eye Contact
Make a System

***
Typography
Illustration
Photo montage
Type + image
Photographic
Handmade
Scan
Collage
[...]