Project 2 Poster | Robinson

Design strategy and client information:

At my high school, National Art Honor Society members craft bowls on a potters wheel, paint them and sell them at their biannual Empty Bowls event. Proceeds are donated to a local soup kitchen. This poster would be displayed in all K-12 schools in the district. It should appeal not only to high school students (the majority of attendees) but also teachers and parents. I wanted the poster to be vibrant yet simplistic- not so trendy that it excludes the older demographic.

The school can afford to print between 30 and 40 of these posters in color, however I do not know if the elementary schools carry 11 x 17 paper. I tried to keep in mind that the poster would be scaled down to a traditional letter size. The event does not take place until late March, so I have time to revise the poster if NAHS members have any objections.

Choice of typefaces:

Never before this project had I realized the severity of Arial Black. I think of it as being such a pedestrian font, but its sharp edges in the all caps letters are rather confrontational. It exaggerates the need for a movement- to combat hunger in our region.

Cooper Std. is ideal for this event because the rounded serifs make me think of the bowl shape. It’s fun and so rarely used that it could easily become recognized as “The Empty Bowls” font year after year.

Visuals:

I found pictures of a mitten and an oven mitt on Google Images and used the pen tool in Illustrator to trace the images. I also used the pen tool to draw the string and knot, and I used the line tool to draw the band in the mitten and the stitching on the oven mitt. The crystallize tool gave the mitten the image of being tattered, suggesting that it belongs to a homeless person. All the text was done in InDesign.

The visual works well with the slogan in a few ways. The mitts are tied together like a pair of boxing gloves, hence the “fighting” slogan. “Hands on” suggests that you literally wear these two articles on your hands, and that the NAHS made the bowls by hand.

The “kitchen appliance” shade of red is C=0, M=100, Y=100 and K=0. The visually contrasting “granny apple smith” green is R=58, G-236 and B=11. The brown mitten is C=35, M=60, Y=80 and K=11.

-Melia Robinson