Conclusion: Critical Introduction

The typographic poster, created for the fictional graphic design conference ‘Sketch’, is influenced heavily by illustration and continuous line designers. Notably Design Butler, Henn Kim, Louise Zergaeng Pomeroy and Boris Schmitz, who all employ minimalistic, illustrative portraits with their portfolios.

These designers use illustration to represent society in artful, sometimes humorous ways. Design Butler, the main inspiration for this project, uses female ‘Instagram’ models in his works. He captures them in positive lights, developing their 2 second selfies into hours of hand drawn art. This inspired the sketch project, having a female model at the base of the overall design, to represent modern beauty.

Historically, illustration was developed as a simple form of expression, dating back to the prehistoric ages. This was then re-defined in the 19 and 20th century, when illustrations became imperative to mechanical development projects. Sketches and maps of mechanics, home furnishings and auto-mobiles were seen as art forms. Nowadays, illustration has become a modern art, used to represent society as well as used in modern products, such as picture books, website designs and video game art.

The main ‘Sketch’ project was created with a photograph at the base. To develop the image, a Wacom graphic design tablet was used to draw the subject, to give the effect of a hand drawn illustration. To develop the design further, the title, ‘Sketch’ was composed in an arch shaping, using the font Helvetica Bold. This font choice references the documentary Helvetica, which informs the viewer about the multi-use font. The informative text in the poster has been placed in a horizontal format. This creates a relationship with the viewers of the poster, as they have to decipher the information, due to it appearing as a mix of letters at first glance.

The main design, used on the typographic poster, was then re-appropriated to create a set of stickers, a twitter banner, web pages and a t-shirt design. These all have the same style, and cross-connect; many design elements from the different products have been used to link the set together as a brand. For example, a sticker design was used on the front of the t-shirt and on one of the web pages, to develop a design recurrence.

Overall, the final body of work is very successful. In relation to design principles, the composition is well-adjusted. When looking at the designs, you can see that balance and form have been taken into account. The text is spaced out evenly and blank space was portrayed as a design element within itself.

The colour within the design is very modernistic. The black and white design is contrasted with pastel pinks and blues. Colour harmony was used as a principle within the design process. The colour scheme is based on complementary colours, mainly chosen from the Tertiary colour wheel. Any colouring chosen was thought over.

Overall, the designs are modern and professional. They appear as a branded set. The illustrative style represents contemporary modern art in a well processed format.