Zerofee - Finessing and Finishing...

Luckily our Zerofee friends seemed quite enthusiastic about the snake concept and so I spent the following (final) week experimenting with typefaces for the pubic triangle and finessing the form of the snake/woman.

Prompted by Paul and Ela I went to visit the Homework exhibition at the Kemistry Gallery in Shoreditch and it really helped to clarify the essence of visual economy and playfulness at the heart of great poster design. I found the whole exhibition really inspiring and will definitely keep an eye on their work in the future...

Ultimately, I opted to use my original choice of typeface ('BigBlokeBB') as it had a roughness to it which captured, in part, the sense of destruction for the woman, yet its considerable 'solidness' and weight gave the poster a bold, striking look.

While I experimented with the slogan as the only text on the poster, it became apparent that without a ‘call to arms’ the design lacked purpose and momentum, and so I opted to include a section of explanatory text, a clarification of the message and the intent of the piece. As such I kept this text relatively clean, employing a guardian-style slab serif typeface that would subconsciously interest and engage my liberal target audience…

I also refined the curves of the snake to reference the bodytype of the women in the developing world more clearly, eg, wider hips, and also tried to make the sense of the snake being a continuous form more obvious.

Overall I'm pretty happy with the design, although in hindsight the explanatory copy seems a little clunky and pedestrian and almost needs a hint more elegance and refinement...

All in all though, a really challenging project, which has definitely made me scrutinise my design choices more consciously and carefully. I've also realised that part of the key to good poster design is visual economy - the poster needs to read in a matter of seconds, even before any text has been read and processed, and as such any superfluous, unnecessary (visual) information serves only to slow and confuse this communication...

In addition, the project has rekindled one of my first passions; that is, print design, and more specifically poster design and so has been invaluable in helping to point me towards the areas I may want to specialise in...