Design Practice: Don't Panic

For this brief we were asked to design 3 posters for the latest Don't Panic poster design competition. We would then take our 3 posters into the final crit and would decide on the best one to submit as our final entry into the competition. The subject word for this month was 'Vogue'.

Don't Panic is a free magazine and website aimed primarily at students but more officially is aimed at anyone interested in modern arts and culture. It includes articles and information on art exhibitions, the popular alternative music scene and events in various cities across the country. In the centre of the magazine is the poster which we had to try and design.

We started the brief with a concept building exercise where we had to come up with 30 words that we thought related to vogue. We then drew symbols to represent each of those words and finally chose 5 words to take forward into designing the poster. My 5 words were Conformity, Brands, Model, Money and Aspiration.
I thought that this concept building exercise was really useful because it gave us some simply imagery to work with that we knew would communicate the right message.

I started this brief by doing some research into the previous winning posters on the Don't Panic website. This was not that useful for giving me ideas because each poster varied in style, colour and content (type, illustration, detail etc). This might seem obvious because each designer would have a different way of working and a different preferred style of design. One thing that it did teach me was that communication of the message did not seem as important as the visual appeal of the poster. I definitely took this into consideration when designing the poster and consciously considered the look of the poster to be the main importance (A quite historic/traditional approach to design). As a designer on this course I realise that I still have to develop my skills in communicating so I still did not forget about communicating the word Vogue as best as possible while still making the poster really visually appealing.

I came up with a couple of different ideas but realised that I had to pick one to develop really quickly as we really had 3 days to create the poster and print it for friday morning. The idea that I chose to develop was mainly focussed around the word 'Aspiration' because I wanted to show the side of fashion where young girls and teenagers look up to the models in the world of fashion and aspire to be like them.
I chose to show this with the most obvious negative aspect of fashion models which is their weight.
To do this I wanted to show a model who was very skinny and I did this by using a picture showing a skinny model in a revealing dress with her ribs showing indicating that she is massively underweight.

I used photoshop brush tool to give the picture a really scratchy effect on the outline and colour of the picture. I wanted to kind of break away from the whole ideology of perfection and purity that comes with the concept of a model.
These are my 3 variations on the final poster.

In the final crit everyone agreed that the best poster was the one without the words because the image practically speaks for itself. One important point was that the centered image made the picture look too stiff and so it should be slightly off center.

I made a couple of changes to the posted and finally submitted this one: