He writes:
The organizer asked for a portrait A0 poster. After some soul-searching and brainstorming I came up with this design/concept. I love a dark background and for me, nothing trumps a simple black background if you can do it cleanly. I have also been inspired by neon colours (the movie Tron to be exact) and that's why I picked those bounding lines!
Steven didn’t say if he’s an old school 1982 Tron fan:
Or a fan of the more recent Tron: Legacy, which had an even more limited palette:
I’ve talked before about the power of pastiche; imitating something you like. When I do that, I can get quite obsessive in trying to match things. I would have looked at these images and used an eyedropper tool to match up shades exactly.
Steven didn’t go that route, as you can see by comparing the overall colour scheme in his poster to these images from Tron movies. He’s mostly gone for orange and green on a dark gray over Tron’s signature cool blue over black.
I like that the lines are clearly a design element in the poster, rather than boxes trying to impose order on the poster.
Dark backgrounds can be tricky: ink bleeds in to white spaces on paper, while light shines out of white spaces on screen. I worry that the print might be a little too fine to read. A very slightly heavier type might have worked a bit better.
Steven goes on:
I don’t particularly like to put too many words/explanations into my poster and would rather have spaces between my results and have a brief caption.
This is always a good choice, although this is still a complicated looking poster with a lot of data. Complex multi-part figures are not as intimidating as a block of text, but they come close.
The flow of text is reasonably clear, although it gets a little complicated in the middle. While there are still clearly rows, the combination of the taller box plus the circle in the middle obscures the reading order a little. The use of low-key numbering is helpful here.
This design worked well for him:
The judges and other participants loved the poster, which allowed me to win the best presentation prize!
Nicely done, Steven!
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1 comment:
I have to wonder how expensive that poster was to print. I mean, printer ink is about as expensive as any liquid and he just nearly covered an A0 sheet of paper with it.
Eh, who knows, maybe it was end-of-fiscal-year and the bosses needed to use up some money. "Everyone! Print everything with a black background!"
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