THE BRIEF
You are to design a poster for a (fictional) exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum entitled “Commercial Art. A Century of Graphic Design”
The Exhibition will run from 31st March 2014 to 12th May 2014 and Admission is free. The exhibition is sponsored by D&AD, The Chartered Society of Designers, The International Society of Typographic Designers and The Arts Council UK.
The exhibition is a recognition of the important role graphic design has played in shaping 20th/21st century culture.
It explores how graphic design has helped shape our cultural grammar and vocabulary.
It explores the role that graphic design plays in creating a shared commercial visual literacy
It documents key movements and moments
It explores the role of designer as author
Your designs should reflect the important role graphic design has played in shaping contemporary visual literacy.
You can create a logo for the exhibition, though this is not essential.
You can also create a strapline to support the exhibition that expands on the exhibition title
The poster is double sided; one side is simple the promotional poster, the other a brief guide to the key themes and exhibits from the exhibition, with explanatory copy to support the images. The poster then folds down to A5.
You will also design additional promotion material to support the exhibition, the choice of which is up to you.
The first thing I did was research starting with the V&A logo, the sponsors’ logo I would need and previous exhibition posters made for the Victoria and Albert Museum.
The poster above gave me the most inspiration because of the layering of images as if its a collage. Therefore reading the brief I decided to collect what I thought to be the most iconic images of the 20th and 21st century graphic design. I first thought of designers before picking the images and I decided on Milton Glaser, David Carson, Shepard Fairey, Paula Scher, Saul Bass, El Lissitzky, Barbara Kruger and more. Researching these designers I pick out some of their images and put them all together producing a tiling effect for the background. Then we created the logo in a black circle and ‘cut’ it out so the background forms the logo then the strip underneath gives you all the information you need. The font of the text is Helvetica Neaue varying from medium to light to ultralight.
Inside the leaflet we have a page of merchandise available to buy including a bag, keyring and mug all of which have the tile design background and black circle V&A logo in the middle of it. It also includes the prices on the same page. The second page shows a strip of images with a piece of information next to it about 20th and 21st century graphic design. On the back page is an image of a map showing the V&A museum and the streets around it (taken from google maps) as well as contact details underneath, telephone number, address and email.
Chelsea Wolstencroft 