MoMA Typographic
Poster Project
This project was originally school project that I was passionate about. The assignment was about creating a poster for a typographic exhibit about the Golden Age of American Advertising Typography featuring Upper and Lowercase Magazine for MoMA—this is fictitious event. There are certain guidelines that the poster needs to have such as date, location and etc. My idea was simply showcasing the typography during that period of time. The researching about this theme and creating an idea how typography was used to what is most commonly used at that time. At the same time, the magazine looked into many different typeface and discuss many ideas of creating type and having fun with the compositions in the magazine using typography main element. From the beginning I wanted to create a very simple design for the event since it would be posted around New York City which is a fasted paced city and very crowded, this case I wanted the design to be simple and straight forward.
The initial process was looking at possible composition of how the information should be presented and following the guidelines of the project. In this stage, I really pushed the idea of just exploring on the typography itself and looking it in a different ways that attracted the attention to the viewer but not making it too abstract but in a decorative way that would attract wider audience. Eventually, I explored a lot of ideas of possible composition of the poster with different style of typography used that represent that specific time to different ways of organizing the information in the poster.
This process was longer because I have more time to reflect and talk about each of the possible composition and further refine some of the successful designs. Which this brings to the idea of revisiting this work and thinking beyond what the project is and eliminating some of the ideas during the initial project during in school. When creating the design from the sketches into the digital aspect, they are many changes and further exploration in order to make the design work. They are many possible poster during this process with refines and suggestions but the final poster represents the best aspects of all the posters from the process work.
This is the initial sketches of the posters. I was trying to make dynamic composition with the primary use of typography and figuring out how to place the information around the poster. I was also thinking about the typefaces would have used during at that time.
This initial ideas are the exploration of different compositions with many combinations of the letterforms and hot the informations is organized in the poster. I also explored the orientation of the poster in landscape as well. But one issue arise from this small project is that the poster would be install in a bus shelter. Therefore, this ideas were not use in the final designs.
I really wanted the poster to focus on the letterforms so, I decided to reverse the whole composition from white background into black background. This created the effect on focus more on the letterforms and better impact of the simple composition which initial was not working. This design worked because it really depicts typography as conveying the information in a very eye catching graphic ways
This design are semifinals of the design with simple variations of different type that reflected that era.
After thinking about the project and how to further refined the project, this needed a small redesign of the project. The final design was one of the process work in early stages. I wanted to further refined for this design because the original design did not work after I fixed the glaring issue of the design such as the hierarchy of the whole poster and general interest of the poster.
This design that I chose from a variety of compositions is best representation of the golden age of typography. This poster is impactful because of the focus on typography which helps thematically what the exhibition is all about. At the end this project was very interesting and insightful to look things different and how further can you push a simple idea and make it work in the design.
This design have added bonus of creating a pattern when they are put all together such as this example here.
Thanks for Checking it out!
