Poster Vocab:
Focus the eye
Overwhelm the eye
Use text as image
Overlap
Assault the Surface
Cut and Paste
Simplify
Tell a story
Amplify
Say two things at once
Communicate with scale
Exploit the diagonal
Make a system
Make eye contact
24×36
This poster uses a very graphic aesthetic influenced by street art to portray Che Guevara, Cuba’s communist leader, which is indicated by the use of red and yellow (colors of the soviet flag.) The black type is overlapping with the image and the copy, placing focus on the text, with a stenciled effect, assaulting the surface.
This poster is a copy and paste collage of repeated, overlapping graphic images to amplify the message. The red background exploits the diagonal to create the effect of motion and movement in the marching crowd.
The last poster from the Cooper Hewitt plays with the idea of making eye contact. It covers the eyes of the character with type, attracting the viewer’s attention through the centralized positioning of the title. Copy is placed on the bottom to maintain the clean and minimalistic look of the portrait.
The posters for The Revolution Will Not Be Televised and Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck use black, white and red or yellow to a strong and contrasting effect emphasized by the graphic quality of the image. The poster for Selma uses a similar color scheme and has the protagonist portrayed with his back towards the audience, indicating that the audience shares his view and “stands behind him”
Those six posters appealed to us in particular since their graphic qualities, the limited palette, using black and white imagery in conjunction with yellow and red and impactful, yet simple type effectively bring up associations with activism, politics, protest, propaganda and hidden identity; those visual tools will become of crucial importance when we will be creating an example of the protagonist’s street art to incorporate into the final poster.
We will use a wide angle shot of the main character facing the wall on which we will place the title of the movie incorporated into an activist graffiti piece presumably created by the protagonist, similarly to the presented examples using the black and white graphic aesthetic with red accents.
