The Audience
Before designing my ice cream social flyer, I needed to learn a little bit more about my target audience: twihards. I decided to begin with some reconnaissance, turning to my girlfriend, ex-twihard community member, as an informant. The Twilight “fandom,” she explained, underwent gradual transformations over the years as it gained popularity: prior to the release of the first film adaptation, the fan community largely comprised young adult readers with a common interest in other fantasy fiction (e.g. Harry Potter) who (mostly) acknowledged the inherent inferiority of the Twilight series but enjoyed it for its storytelling nonetheless.
Propelled by the fanfare surrounding the movies, however, the community quickly took on certain eccentric qualities. The “twihard” was born, a name associated with obsessive teenage girls without a single bone in their fragile pubescent bodies capable of appreciating good literature, even if it were catapulted from the literary canon straight into their foreheads.
Of course, young females are easy targets for criticism, seeing as they are both (a) young and (b) female. Seriously, as easy as it is to mock teenagers, just add “female” to the mix and you have a ripe opportunity for reducing complex and confusing insecurities about identity to hormonal, boy-crazed mania. Making young females the object of satire and criticism would be, in my opinion, the easy way to complete this assignment.
Instead, I set out to create a flyer genuinely interested in advertising to twihards (no matter how little respect I have for the series as works of literature).
The Flyer
I turned to Google for examples of flyers. My favorites tended to feature (a) an ice cream cone, (b) large and small typographical elements, and (c) a bright color palette. This particular configuration seems ideal for an image around the size of 8.5" x 11". My flyer, I decided, should work as both digital product and wall art (given the teenage affinity for tacking objects to bedroom walls) - I wanted it to be something that could be both handed out after class and shared over social media.
The Design
My next step was to imagine how the flyer might both instantaneously and meaningfully resonate with its target audience. Firstly, what images or moments from the series might I reference or represent in the flyer that fans would immediately recognize and appreciate? Secondly, how might I incorporate these elements into a design that successfully conveys essential information about the time, theme, and location of the event?
The obvious design inspiration? The cover of the title book: eye-catching red; pale, white arm; unmistakable jagged font face. But I did not want my flyer to be mere imitation: I wanted it to be an earnest engagement with both the story and the fans, sans parodic insult. If there were to be any subtext to my image, it would be the notion that the interests of teenage girls absolutely warrant serious consideration, with implicit support for their imaginative impulses and their willingness to "lose" themselves in fiction (even if I do gag reflexively at the suggestion of taking Twilight seriously in any context).
Next, I began brainstorming.
While at first I had imagined a pale arm and hand grasping an ice cream cone, dripping as if with blood (in an allusion to the cover of the first book in the series), I quickly scrapped this for a ribbon wrapping around the cone (an allusion to the third book cover), because I thought it might open up the design a bit and promote more eye-travel.
With my sketch finished, I started drawing and filling in with colors. I outlined an ice cream cone, an apple slice, and the ribbon using the pathfinder tools and reference images from Google.
As my design progressed, I saw what worked and what did not work, revising my plans as I went. At first, for instance, I had planned to use a quote from the series, but this proved difficult to incorporate. I experimented with shapes, colors, gradients, placement... Once I started filling in the text, I realized that the negative space seemed awkwardly distributed, so I added an unplanned element: a moon and crescent. (This was actually a nice addition, because it meant I had alluded to Twilight, New Moon, and Eclipse!)
The final touch was to add an overlay texture that would help tie all the moments of the design together. For this, I picked something sufficiently grungy off the interwebz.
And now, without further ado...
