Brief
For this project we had to design 40 different thumbnail ideas for a portrait format theatre poster. We then had to take five of our ideas and and refine/develop them further. Finally we had to take the three best designs and work them up as more detailed client visuals on a slightly bigger scale.
Research/Thumbnails I chose to design a poster for the theatre production 'Hamlet', a play about the ghost of the King of Denmark telling his son to avenge his murder by killing the new king, who is Hamlets uncle (research taken from here). Themes of the play revolve around madness, life and death and revenge, so many of my ideas feature elements such as skulls, swords, ghostly figures and blood.
Developments
I really liked the idea of using a crown shapes as part of the lettering so I explored this idea further when developing my poster thumbnails. I also looked at a few different typefaces; ones that had a more medieval look to them. I tried to think of different ways to layout the
poster, trying some posters with the main title of the play at the top and others in the centre.
Final Piece
These are the designs I was most pleased with and choose to work up in more detail. The first design I chose to make more ornamental/decorative, to represent the 'royal' theme of the play, using gold and blue and further developing the idea of added a crown onto of the type itself. The second design also played with the idea of using the crown onto of the text but in a different style. This design also incorporated the skull to represent the theme of death and the character, Yoricks, skull itself. I preferred the cleanness of this poster in contrast to the third design which features a sword dripping with blood. I liked the idea of incorporating the crown into the type as the letter 'M' and also making the layout a bit more dynamic by having the text on a slant rather than it all being uniformly straight and centred.
Overall, I'm happy with the outcome of the project as I think my designs are all quite different from each other, allowing the client to have a good variation of ideas to choose from. It was a big challenge trying to come up with so many ideas as its something I'm not used to doing but I will continue to improve on this as the course progresses.
