OUGD405 - Cell Phone Symphony - Design Development

OUGD405 - Cell Phone Symphony - Design Development

This poster demonstrated well thought out design decisions and resolved imagery and type which made it the clear choice to develop further. However these design decisions needed to be refined even more to make it an effective and impactful poster.

The most fundamental factor which had to be developed was the colour and background; as an initial idea, the orange and purple colour palette attempted to create a bold composition with its combination of tertiary colours however it ended up convoluting the already intricate design, a notion repeated in a group critique. Therefore it was replaced by a green/teal hue in reference to the screens of phones from the early 2000’s. The warped grid pattern was added in later, subject to another group critique, in order to make the composition less flat and more dynamic.

Small details were also refined in the imagery of the poster; the lines which hung from the phone tower as they would normally were straightened out to only have a very subtle bend, more lines were added into the top left corner and a cluster of musical notes were added to the bottom right corner where the lines end. All of these changes were made firstly as small technical adjustments to increase the aesthetic value of the composition but also to increase the movement and dynamism of the poster.

Changes in kerning were made individually to the heading type and the stems of some letters were extended. The reason for these changes was to further develop the idea of simultaneous signals taking place like in Cell Phone Symphony. The colours and outlines of some of these letterforms also changed in order to create a more harmonious hierarchy in relation to where the emphasis is on the words as you say them, which also correlated to the visual hierarchy effectively.

The last development to the poster was the body text; the Andale Mono body text in the bottom left corner was substituted for Franklin Gothic Condensed Bold and individual lines were separated and aligned with the grid system and heading typography, this was to further communicate the idea of multiple signals being relayed at once but also to give the impression of random harmonious relationships within the composition.