Construction posters evaluation

So here are the two finished health and safety posters for the Construction dept. at college. After many designs ideas and plenty of playing about with techniques on photoshop and illustrator, I have finally come up with two designs that I am completely happy with and fulfil their purposes. Below are screenshots of my final two designs followed by my evaluation.

Designing posters for College Construction dept. was certainly not an easy task. We had very strict parameters to stick to, which in the end actually made it easier to refine the designs, however made it tricky to begin with as our ideas were somewhat restricted. The finished posters are soon to be professionally printed and displayed in the Construction building.

The fonts used are ‘Impact’ for the title and copy line and ‘Helvetica’ for the body text at the bottom. These two fonts had been determined in the brief, so that all our designs showed consistency and could be directly identifiable as a set. ‘Helvetica’ is known to be an easily readable font, including for people who suffer from Dyslexia. ‘Impact’ basically does what it says on the tin: has IMPACT. The font is bold and sharp; the weight is heavy yet clear enough to grab the viewer’s attention from a distance. The body text is only clear fairly close up, but this forces the viewer to approach the poster to read it, providing the design visually engages them upon their first view of it.

I would say my poster designs are engaging to the viewer because the bright text on the black background stands out and the images have filters on, causing them to be not instantly recognisable and a little abstract. This should provoke interest from the viewer because they will want to read the text to find out what the poster is about, and will move closer to the poster to see what the picture is. Humans are naturally curious and therefore I am assuming most would approach the poster to view the image in order to get a clearer understanding of what the poster represents. I chose to have photographic images on my designs because I liked the idea of them being crisp and realistic, rather than using my own illustrations. I think the photographs help get the point across better, as it is harder to misinterpret the meanings of photographs.

As part of the brief, we had to apply a filter called Fresco to our images before applying something called ‘Duotone’ in yellow and black. The fresco filter and duotone work well together in this image because the yellow hits the mid tones, black hits the dark tones and white hits the lighter tones, while the fresco filter distorts the image and gives it a fuzzy texture. This kind of filter works best on photographic images due to the amount of tone, for example it wouldn't work on a block colour image and could possibly make an illustration unrecognisable by distorting too much, but it would depend on the style of the illustration and how it has been drawn/coloured.

Attention to detail can make or break a design, so I specifically spent time making sure all my text and imagery was in line, leaving the correct amounts of space between each, and hopefully getting the balance just right. I used guides and rulers on Illustrator to ensure this and made sure the type style was sharp and clear by getting the sizing right, to make optimum use of the space I had to work with, while not making the design seem overcrowded. The focal point of the posters are the headings because the bold, sharp text grabs the viewer’s attention from across the room and the images draw them in further, along with the bold copy lines. The contrast of colours makes the designs stand out from other posters and the fact that everything is precise and sharp adds a professional feel to the designs.

Overall, I’m very happy with my designs, and everyone else’s for that matter, because they’re consistent and actually look like a professional set of health and safety posters. They are informative and instructional, therefore fulfilling their purposes and some are slightly jokey, which will appeal to the target audience. They are sharp, bold and modern, with a quirky colour scheme that would appeal to anyone because it’s so eye catching. An all-round good job.