Blackbird

Creating an A3 poster and an accompanying A6 flyer for a singing group posed quite a challenge. The brief made clear that the group had limited resources and reproduction would be in black and white, and that photos would not reproduce too well.

I started by looking at the information that needed to go on the poster. I added a few details I thought were missing from the initial brief (morning or evening for the time, location of village hall, number of sessions and contact name) and started to put the information into a hierarchy. For the poster it was important to grab the attention of those who might be interested so i decided to pose the question 'Do you love to sing?' and then answering it with the basic information covering what the class actually was. To maintain interest an encourage people further I decided to add  the details about no experience necessary/no need to read music, and added 'beginners welcome'.

Once I had covered these positice eye catchers in the top half of the poster I decided to introduce the when and where. Once I'd discovered that I decided to break up the more mundane details and maintain interest with a couple of the other positive aspects of the class mentioned in the brief - it being fun and a chance to meet people. once I'd doe this I then felt I could go with the price and contact details to finish with.    

I found InDesign very useful for this exercise. Initially I was thinking about going with Broadway for the typeface, but when I started to type it out it looked too niche. After some playing around I settled on Elephant which worked really well for the whole of the poster - it reproduces clearly and gave it a musical, slightly artistic feel.

After finishing the typing I still felt the poster lacked something. To break up the type I had thought about points for the part about beginners welcome and this gave me the idea of the crotchets. As I was creating the circles I had the idea of singing crotchet sand adapted the idea for the singers illustration around 'SingOut' - the name of the grouip. I thought this worked well but was keen to integrate it a bit more into the type and decided to add a pattern of notes to link the two elements to form a logo of sorts.

Drawing up the double-sided flyer, I was able to draw on the experience of designing the poster. I decided to go with the eye-catching positive elements on the front of the flyer, again posting the question to grab attention before providing the basic details of what the flyer was A6 size I simplified the logo, making the heads bigger for reproduction and reducing the number of notes linking the heads to the group's name.

On the back of the flyer I decided to slightly re-order the information on the poster. As there was no guarantee the flyer 'front' would be read first I wen with the positives 'meet people' and 'have fun' to grab attention. I decided to reinforce the positives with the 'beginners welcome' theme and then provided the final three blocks of information (where, price and contact details) to finish.

I'm pleased with the outcome of both the poster and the flyer. Although I did want both logos to be the same I think the one on the poster is more elegant, whereas the one on the poster is punchier, and for me both fulfil different roles equally well.  I'm also pleased I decided not go with some of my other ideas, such as adding staves and clefs, as I don't feel these would have added anything and would have over-complicated things. I like the fact that  I've managed to get all the information on, kept to a black and white palette with simple illustrations - and still made the poster and flyer aesethically pleasing.