Art Deco Weekend Poster
The client of the Art Deco Weekend in Miami was looking to graphic designers to create a poster to advertise their lecture series. The Art Deco Weekend itself has many different events, however, the idea was to have a poster that could make a very information based event (the lectures) with heavy text description to entice the eye of a passerby. The target audience was an older audience, looking for more abstract discussions of art.
John Roberts took to the website and immediately took note of major themes and words that kept repeating. He found a lot of the art deco style wasn’t just the main topic, but would literally surround most of the events in 70s art deco houses. Thus, he decided that he could apply a proper type structure and hierarchy while allowing the main theme to be art deco.
After gears where turning and ideas were flowing with sketches and type exercises, John created a type study, with the subheadings and body text eventually becoming Didot. He chose the font based on its elegance that would balance out the busy, fat font he was to use for the heading on the poster. There were experiments with heading design and color pallets of bright colors, but the poster ended up in a crisp gold and slate black. Let it be known, art deco can apply to both color pallets, but John saw that a professional lecture series called for a level of shaped elegance.
After trial and error, he finally decided that a sharp, dark design would be best. This decision was based on the inside of art deco hotels and homes. Originally, he was looking on the outside of the pale colored homes, but after seeing the inside, the small detail with large contained design seemed like a perfect fit for such a poster, containing blocks of small text with large design choices around them.
The final solution became an art deco or “Great Gatsby-esque” poster highlighting lecture speakers presenting that weekend in January. With a large, bright shape to catch the eye, the draw in will allow an audience to decipher important information with contracting colors and font weights. All creating a proper access to event information.
