No News is Good News - Part 2 - 3 Posters

This week's brief was to react to a statement using the information we accumulated the week before in the first part of 'No News is Good News' and produce 3 posters, one using type, one image and one a combination of both.

As previously decided, I focused on the view that twitter is becoming an addiction.

Before we set out to produce the posters we did an idea session on monday which consisted of writing/ drawing 10 different things in relation to the topic we had chosen.

• 10 verbs
• 10 adjectives
• 10 images
• 10 icons

I, at first found this quite tricky and couldn't get my head around the difference between nouns and adjectives... maybe that's just my poor education, but once I started, i found that it really helped me think of ways of resolving the brief.

After this exercise I found that ideas for the brief came quite easily and many of them featured the things we had done previously.

I wanted to pay attention to the part of the brief which said "keep it brief, simple and to the point" and decided to look into how i could visually communicate an addiction... any addiction and then bring Twitter into it.

I also decided I didn't want to do one image and one bit of type... and combine the two for the third. I wanted to be more imaginative than that... maybe zone in on 2 different addictions?

IMAGE

I looked at the obvious addictions... smoking, heroin etc and decided that obvious was the best way to portray what i was trying to say (keeping it to the point and all that...) and set out to try and incorporate twitter into this.
I came to a firm decisions about my colour-scheme rapidly as, in some ways, it was already decided for me as it fits in with the 'twitter' colours (pale blue and black).
I wanted to use the twitter logo as a prominent feature in the illustration (this was also an opportunity to practise my illustrator skills) and proceeded to trace it and play around with different layouts, also including a cigarette a

s the addiction chosen.
There are several different logos on the website, one includes the traditional bird icon with illustrative curly branches which i decided would look good to portray smoke coming out of the end of the cigarette.


I experimented with different layouts and positioning on illustrator, combining the smoke-branch, cigarette and small birds and came up with this as a final piece.

TEXT

Similarly to the colour-scheme, the typeface i chose to use was almost chosen for me... I found a couple of typefaces which resembled the one used on the website and experimented with different colour arrangements and layouts.
The typefaces proved a slight problem as neither looked completely right when put together... which made me combine the two to make it look effective.

(z) Arista -
Picoblack -

I wanted this poster to look simple but punchy and decided, after much experimentation, that the words 'twitter is becoming an' should be in

black... and the word 'addiction' in the twitter-blue colour, highlighting the most important part of the message.
I then came to the conclusion that the type positioned on the bottom-left of the page looked best.
This is the final poster...

TEXT AND IMAGE

Once i had done both the image and type posters, the combination of the two seemed to come a lot easier.
I wanted to keep the phrase 'Twitter is becoming an addiction' and lay it out the similarly (if not the same) as the type poster. For the illustration, however, I wanted to vary it away from the original cigarette image and focus on another addiction.
For this I wanted to find an addiction which was both controversial and had strong visuals. Heroin was one which ticked all the boxes. It is the most controversial of the substance addictions... and there was a lot of imagery associated with it (spoon, tin foil, flames) and decided to go with that.
The imagery for this poster seemed to take me a lot more time than the last one as there were several different layouts which i could use. At first I overcrowded the page with the bird icon...
then I didn't have enough... in the end i settled on them fanning out of the spoon... getting larger the further away.
This is the final image...

For the stock, I printed it out on white... which didn't seem to give the effect I wanted. I then tried it out on brown... which, once again, didn't have the desired effect.


The library didn't have the colour I wanted... therefore i walked into town and bought a pale blue colour... which went really well with the designs.