BAM presents Next Wave Festival

Every year, the Brooklyn Academy of Music holds an event called the Next Wave Festival. This festival celebrates the performing arts, mainly music, dance, plays, and talks. Many of these performances are experimental and avant-garde, and so I wanted to create a poster that would capture these sentiments.

Project advisor: Jennifer Cole Phillips

Back of poster. The individual events are arranged in an overall spiral pattern.

Before beginning any project, I always jot down my ideas in sketchform. Many ideas are thrown out, but this process is important to me in order to narrow down to more concrete ideas. The abstract waveform was eventually tossed because it was too literal for me (left). But I knew I was getting somewhere when I started building letters out of square blocks (right).

Just a few first drafts with trying the block-building approach. At this point I was also playing around with colors and mood.

These were getting closer to what I wanted the final composition to look like. I enjoyed the focal point on type, but I felt an image was needed to solidify the concept. I toyed with exposing the square modular grids that I was using throughout the poster, as well as trying more subtle colors. I also wanted to incorporate more gradients because it conveys the same feeling of something "washing over me" as when I am exposed to emotive music or dance.

This shot is for scale purposes. The final dimensions of the poster was 33 x 40 in.

A scale shot of the back. The text blocks are arranged in a spiral pattern, starting from the outside in. As mentioned earlier, the same square modular block was used throughout the poster for consistency.

A closeup of the poster, front and back. As the patron attends each event, she physically takes a piece of the poster, thereby deconstructing it via the same modular grid that was used to construct it.

Closeup shot of the event ticket typography. A single typeface was used to achieve consistency (Balto), but to create contraste I used its many weights in various sizes. Details of the event, such as credits and timeframes can also be seen here.