Poster Project Rationale | Wettje

Design Strategy:

For my not-for-profit organization, I chose Habitat for Humanity because I am taking part in their Alternative Spring Break program. Currently, Habitat and everyone involved on the trip is trying to raise money to help fund the trips to the various locations. The burden of fundraising has fallen on the participants in whatever way they felt necessary and/or efficient. My idea to fundraise came in the form of a friend coming on the trip, who was able to get Wegmans to donate gift cards that can be raffled off, thus the idea for the event.

I went through a lot of different ideas involving raffle drums and raffle tickets but they weren’t iconic enough to stand out and be noticeable. So, I went back to what the root of Habitat for Humanity is; houses. That’s where the idea for smoke coming out of the chimney in the form of information came about for this poster. I felt it was an interesting way to present the important details. The poster follows the rule of thirds, with the title, information, and house each getting their own section.

Because this is a smaller, one hall event, I decided that extra color wouldn’t be too expensive and would make the poster more appealing to look at. However, if this event were to be expanded, then the blue background is easily swapped out for white and the poster still looks just as good.

Choice of Typefaces:

Because the words were going to get warped into the form of smoke, I wanted a very simple font to keep things readable. I came up with Myriad Pro. It’s a sans serif that has a very clean look and the counters stretched very well, lending to easy readability. I used both caps and lowercase because I wanted to keep everything about the text as simple as possible. If something in a dorm is hard to read, you have no chance of it getting attention drawn to it. That’s why I wanted a simple, iconic image and a simple, easy-to-read font for what I wanted to do to it.

Visuals:

I found a picture of a house with a chimney and traced it with the pen tool. The type is all warped with the envelope tool and rotated into place to create the image of smoke from the chimney. The grass under the house was made with the symbol sprayer tool. Like the design itself, making the images was a very simple process. The hardest part was getting a good idea on paper in the sketching stage. After that, everything fell into place. The blue in the background was meant to mirror the blue of the sky and I wanted a rustic feel to the house, so I chose an earthy red for it. The blue is C=100 and the red is C=16.86 M= 100 Y=100 K= 8.63.