OUGD406 - Studio Brief 04 - Reflective Practice - Sketching and Development

After the crit I decided to narrow it down to 3 ideas:

- You’ve got bear blogging to do

- Book the print room now

- Always proof read

I began sketching layout and characters for these 3 posters, keeping in mind that they all had to work as a set so to keep the colour scheme, typography and illustrative style coherant across the 3 designs.

These are the first sketches I did. I sketched everything out in pencil first to get an idea of the composition on each poster. 

I then re-drew them in pen and scanned them into photoshop so I could play around with the possibilities of different colour schemes. 

As I knew I was going to screen print the posters I needed to keep my colour choices simple so limited each screen print to a maximum of 4 colour seperations.

To make the set of posters coherent I decided to focus on a limited colour palette so they all looked good when displayed together on the wall. It would also make the process of screen printing cheaper and easier as I wouldn’t have to buy as many different pots of
medium or spend as much time mixing the colours. 

I experimented with various layouts and sketched out a number of variations of the type using hand lettering. 

I decided to change ‘you’ve got bear blogging to do’ to ‘blogging is bearable’ as it reassures freshers and makes blogging seem less daunting rather than frightening them with the amount of blogging that is required. 

I found it quite challenging to position both the illustrations and typography together effectively on the page so it took me various attempts to come up with an appropriate layout for each poster. 

These 3 coloured images were the first resolution I got for the posters. 

I asked my peers for feedback and I soon realised that they weren’t as visually eye catching as I had hoped them to be. 

The typography across the set wasn’t consistent which made them look
unfinished and clumsy and many people didn’t understand the ‘Book the print room now’ until I explained that ‘You have to book the print room so far in advance you’re not even born yet’.

This dawned on me that if my own classmates didn’t understand then freshers definitely wouldn’t as they would have never experienced a drop in queue. 

This would mean the project was pointless as one of the main deliverables was that it had to be suitable for freshers.

I went back to the drawing board and decided to make each poster with the same typography. 

I also changed the illustration from an unborn baby to a calendar on the ‘book the print room’ poster. After making these alterations the posters looked much more consistent and worked a lot better as a set. 

I chose CMYK colour #608091 in photoshop to try and replicate with the screen print inks as it worked well as the colour for the bear’s fur but also looked good as the stripes and the calendar headers. 

Once I was happy with the colour scheme and composition I printed out the different colour separations for each poster and got them exposed onto 3 large screens.
 

The process of getting the screens developed and actually printing the posters took a total of 2 whole days.

Fortunately everything went according to plan and I didn’t have too many major issues when screen printing.