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Poster Design Assignment 5 & 6: Typoday and Final poster

For the last 2 assignments we were given the option to combine them and work on the same topic for both of them.

Assignment 5 was designing a poster to send out for the poster design competition of Typoday 2025.

Assignment 6 was designing a poster series of 3 posters about any topic of our choice.

I decided to combine the 2 assignments so I wanted to make make designs that could work both as entries for typoday and a standalone poster.

For my topic I knew I wanted to work on something in my native language Assamese. After multiple days spent researching I came across a documentary of the struggles faced by the tea tribes of Assam. I chose this topic to raise awareness on their struggles and the resilience they show.

For the first poster I wanted to show the tea tribes' link to tea gardens. I made an illustrated poster that looks like a photo of a tea plantation taken from a drone overhead. I added the text " চাহপাতৰ ���াহিনী" (sahpator kahini) that roughly translates to "a tea leaf's story" and added a tagline "their struggle, your sip" to talk about how much these workers are exploited for the most popular beverage of India

For the second poster I instead focused on the culture of the tea tribes, specifically on the Jhumur dance. Jhumur dance performances, integral to the cultural identity of the Tea Tribe community, often include songs rich in poetic expressions of hope, resilience, and connection to nature. The lyrics of Jhumur songs are heartfelt and express themes such as enduring struggles, unity, longing, and celebration of life.

I illustrated a a common phrase from Jhumur song lyrics and added vector illustrations of dancing ladies on the top and bottom of the page. The text "জীৱনৰ সুৰ" (Jeevanor Sur) roughly translates to "melody of life". This phrase symbolizes the rhythm of life, encompassing both struggles and joys, and reflects resilience through music.

For the third poster I wanted to have a stronger message and decided to add the title "Who harvests your cup?" to highlight the often-overlooked struggles of the Tea Tribe community. I added an illustration of a tea garden plucking tea leaves inside of a tea cup. I then added the same tagline that I used in the first poster "Their struggle, your sip" at the bottom. I wanted to emphasize to the viewer of how much struggle and exploitation takes place for them to be able to enjoy a hot cup of their favourite beverage all year round.

If you want to learn more about the struggles and daily life of the tea tribe workers I will attach the link to the documentary that I came across while researching this topic:

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Poster Design Assignment 4: Discipline outcome based poster

Assignment Brief: We were divided into groups of four and each group was assigned a discipline within the university. Every group was to design one teaser poster and one final poster from someone of their discipline. The poster could be promoting a product, an event, etc.

Our group was assigned the School of Health Sciences. After going over and interviewing some students and faculty about their research that we could work on, we decided to work a faculty member who had researched and developed an upgraded version of a common laboratory equipment called an "Electronic inoculation loop".

For the teaser we decided to make a vector motion poster to raise curiosity in a viewer. This was our first time making a teaser poster and we had a previous concept that was rejected. The key thing about a teaser is to raise curiosity and excitement without revealing too much. So for our second attempt we kept minimal information in the poster:

For the final poster we could disclose more important information to excite the viewer, however, since the target audience were lab technicians, health institutions and biotech companies, we also kept the information concise. We used an AI generated image to add to the final poster as the prototype made by the faculty wasn't in the final stage:

This was also a fun assignment. The main objective of this assignment aside from the designs was learning how to work with clients, and it was fun how it is going to be in the future.

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Poster Design Assignment 3: Interactive Poster

Assignment Brief: Making a poster with the main emphasis on interaction. Group assignment.

For this assignment after a lot of brainstorming on different topics and interactive elements we could work on decided to work on the topic of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD). Knowing how many misconceptions and stigmas there were attached to the condition, we decided on making a myth buster poster dismissing the most common misconceptions.

For the interactive element we created a mechanism where a viewer could read a myth and then pull on a paper strip to reveal the fact debunking the myth right below it. The myths and facts were printed on a separate sheet that would go underneath the main sheet of paper.

then we attached pullies on the back layer with the myths and facts, the viewer can pull the pullies up or down to read the myths or facts. There are holes on the upper layer to let you see through and read the myths and facts. We also added a QR code taking the viewer to the site of the International OCD Foundation upon scanning for more info and help.

Here is a video of the working of the poster:

It was very fun ideating for this poster especially cause I got to learn a lot about ingenious methods of interactive mechanisms in posters.

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Poster Design Assignment 2: News analysis

Assignment Brief: We were tasked on collecting News headlines over the course of 3 days. On the day of class all the students read out one of their headlines and we were assigned into groups based on similar News topics. We had to make a poster around the common topic of our News headlines in the group

My group had news surrounding academic cheating and fraud, so we finalized our topic to be "Preserving the ethics of academia" on which we made the following draft.

We made the visual of a book locked up wrapped in chains showing how when academic integrity in compromised learning and knowledge suffer.

This assignment for me was the most difficult one ideation wise, which might be not having a prior understanding of the topic. Regardless, it was a great experience researching and working on this assignment.

[notreallymytypeface]

Poster Design Assignment 1: Social Justice and Equality

Assignment Brief: We were given the brief of designing a poster on the topic "Social justice and equality" as the first assignment for the module applying laws of closure and figure and ground.

The first draft that I made had concepts of the hand of justice and using a dove as a symbol for freedom. The message that I wanted to convey was how how you have to fight for justice and freedom sometimes, and how without justice freedom is just an illusion, however after getting feedback from my peers and faculty it seemed that this draft was too abstract and the message got misinterpreted.

So for the second draft I combined the hand of justice and bird of freedom to show that the hand was forming part of the bird, rather than forcefully grabbing it. This concept was much more straightforward and followed the assignment brief better so this is the one that I finalized.

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Tag Re-design

Assignment brief: Choose a clothing tag and first recreate it exactly as it is, front and back. After that improve the design by altering the placement of the information.

I chose a tag from the clothing brand “new me”. They attach two tags to their clothing, one smaller and one larger. While they are similar from the front, at the back the smaller tag has the QR code that takes you to their website, and the larger one has the price and size information.

For the redesign while I kept the front design almost identical as it didn’t need much changes, I combined the back of both the large and small tag so that the same amount of information is now on one tag. This will save money and reduce wastage if implemented. I also changed the font used on the price info to Bell Centennial as it is much more suitable for printing in lower point sizes.

Reflection: By doing this assignment I learned how intricate typography on such a small scale is. I learned how to display information in such small sizes properly without the text getting too small, and how to design articles in such small sizes.

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Magazine spread

Assignment brief: Based on the word chosen for the expressive typography assignment, create a double page magazine spread highlighting an image of aforementioned word spelled out using found objects.

For this assignment we first had to go and find and objects to spell out our word with. I wanted to use my same concept of writing the word "BLANK" but with the letter 'A' replaced by a ' _ ' . I used some dried out leaves along with a painted strip on the side of a road to achieve this.

After this, we had to use this image in a double page magazine spread. We were given the choice of adding our expressive typography but I decided not to do that, although I used a similar concept for the title of the article.

I generated a 700 word article with the help of ChatGPT that I used in the body text. From all of this I made 2 layouts:

The first layout looked interesting on screen but the white body text on the dark background was creating readability issues, so I decided to go ahead and finalize the second layout after some tweaks.

Here is what it looks like in a mockup:

Reflection: through this assignment I learned to fully utilize grids effectively in a double page spread and also how to manage large amounts of text while also keeping the emphasis on an image.

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Type poster

Assignment brief: Create motion typographic poster on the assigned typeface. Highlight the counters, special anatomical features, and also any specific glyph that you like in that typeface.

Everyone in class was assigned a unique typeface on which we had to first do a research presentation to properly get to know everything about and get attached to our typefaces, and then based on our learning had to create a motion poster.

I was assigned the typeface Bell Centennial. A typeface created in 1978 by Matthew Carter to solve a very specific problem of more and more information needing to be printed on telephone directories, which later on became a staple type that could be used anywhere where compact spacing and legibility were crucial on low quality paper.

I'll also attach my presentation video on Bell Centennial where I went more in depth on it's history and features if you would like to know more about it

I wanted to highlight the key points about Bell Centennial's history and anatomy in my motion poster, and thus I decided to make a looping video that would touch up on everything about the type. Here is what the first draft of the poster looked like static.

And here is the final outcome.

Reflection: Aside from the vast amount I learned about Bell Centennial, I also learned quite a lot about how to make interesting moving compositions. This is something I would love to do more of in the future.

[notreallymytypeface]

Type as image- Expressive typography

Assignment brief: We had to come up with 10 words at random and then choose 5 words from that to create expressive typography on, and from those 5 we further had to finalize 1 word for which we had to make minimum 3 drafts with body text.

My original 10 words were DISCOMFORT, DAZED, SPIN, BLANK, LIT, WARM, CONFUSED, FIDGETY, TIME, SORE. Out of these I sorted out WARM, CONFUSED, BLANK, LIT and FIDGETY, and decided to go ahead with BLANK.

I first had some ideations on paper, and I particularly liked an idea of using a dash " _ " to replace the letter "A" to create a literal blank.

I then started to explore it digitally and experimented with different fonts and comparing them side by side. I wanted a very geometric font but I couldn't quite find something that fit my requirement perfectly so I decided to make my own letterforms using basic shapes and lines.

I then went ahead and started playing around with alignment, arrangement, negative space and switching around the black and whites, and came up with 4 drafts, from which i finalized these 2 layouts.

For the body text I used a quote by William Somerset Maugham that goes as "I wanted to write down exactly What I felt but somehow the paper stayed empty, and I could not have described it any better" which was a perfect text to pair with the word "blank".

Reflection: with this assignment I learned some fundamentals of layouts and grids. But more importantly how to portray a type as an image and how to convey an emotion visually through type instead of just literally.

[notreallymytypeface]

Hand-lettering and Calligraphy

Based on a demonstration session done in class, we had an exercise in class to learn basic calligraphy.

We started with vertical, horizontal, diagonal and circular strokes by holding a flat brush at 45 degree angle. Thin strokes while going up, and thick strokes while coming down.

Then we wrote all capital letters based on the strokes that we practiced. I don't have the steadiest hands so they didn't turn out the best.

After came exercises for the lower-case letters. We wrote the word "minimum" repeatedly to get used to the flow of of the lower-case strokes.

At the end we were tasked to write the phrase "type mera karm aur dharm hai!", alternating between lower-case and upper-case letters.

Reflection: This exercise helped me understand the fundamental shapes and strokes that make up the anatomy of letters. It helped me understand how type is constructed and how the contrast in strokes function visually.

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Scavenger Hunt: Type Anatomy

Assignment brief: Based on the discussions that took place in class, we were tasked to create an outcome to show our understanding of the vocabulary of type anatomy. I decided to create a video

Reflection: This assignment helped me gain an understanding of the nomenclature surrounding type anatomy and also helped me start observing the differences in the letterforms of different typefaces.