Music Poster Design
Poster designed by Sissi Zheng
Name of the Music: Imagination
Artist: Dean, Miso
Processes and Concept
One Black Square has mainly two influences on my poster design. Firstly, since I am only allowed to use black and white, it is hard to depict shadow with grey shade. I learned how to use a gradient of black to create a 3-D effect. Secondly, One Black Square helped me to get more familiar with Gestalt theory, which also enhances my aesthetics on poster design. The song is about how life routine changes during the COVID-19 period, and how people lost themselves and couldn’t co-exist with this huge change. The artist wanted to convey that we should still be dreaming although this period of time is hard to go through.
Confused, Lost
Dreamy setting
On the top left, I twisted the front of the word ‘True’, to contrast with other words to convey that True is distorted, and True is an illusion. The rhythm reminds me of a circulating image, and overall emotion of dreamy, calm, confused, and trapped into a certain routine. I created a black hole to interact with the audience. As the audience looks into this 3-D shape to try to understand what are the words inside it, this 3-D shapes act as a ‘real black hole’ that grabs the audience’s attention.
I also tried to use texts to create the shape of humans to express certain emotions. For the one at the top tight, a man running is depicted to show the emotion of hurried, scurried, and exhausted. The one on the bottom left is a man resting, showing a process from exhausted to recover.
The circular ring of text is a visual metaphor of "routine" and "circulation" in life that we cannot escape. In the period of COVID-19, this routine is changed and is even broken. One would be lost in this huge gap in our routine.
Successes and Difficulties
One of the successes of this project is I learned how to use techniques such as 3D and transform in adobe illustrator.
When creating the circular ring, I drew an oral, and I used the “extrude and bevel option” in the 3D function to make the oral into a 3D ring. Then, I transform the text into a symbol, then add it onto the external surface of the 3D shape.
When creating my black hole, I repeated the same processes except I used another 3D function, which is the revolve function to turn half of an oral into a 3D shape like a blackhole. I adjusted the value of the angle to experiment with which angle has the best aesthetics (figure 1).
On the 3D shape, I made the text that would be paste on the 3D shape into a symbol (figure 2).
Figure 1
Figure 2
In the mid-critique, I presented two ideas and wanted to gather feedback to let me choose from one of the two. Before the critique, I found that people are staring at the black hole to see what do the words say. That interaction is exactly what I want in the audience, that they are attracted by the words as if they are attracted by the black hole. Many people suggest that I need to make one object dominant. I found that audience could focus on one thing, which would make their eyes tired since there isn’t a major place for their eyes to rest. I improved by making the blackhole more dominant and changing the composition as if the other things are orbiting the main object- blackhole.
Ideas in Critique
Final Idea
For improvements, I could focus more on the gestalt theory. I think I am conceptually strong. I need to think more about the aesthetics in the aspect of the gestalt theory, for example, to think about how can I place the black hole in a different way to make the image more symmetric or satisfy to look.