Week Six | Odiamar

GRA 217: Project Two – Poster Design

The not-for-profit organization I chose to create a poster for is The David Sheldrick Wildlife Trust that aims to “protect and preserve Africa’s wilderness and its denizens”. The event is to raise money and awareness for the orphaned elephants in the Sheldrick Trust, located in Kenya. The sold out event takes place in Soho, New York making the demographic for this poster people, in their late 20’s to early 40’s, of economic stability, who are knowledgeable about quality design. The parameters I set for myself were to create a simple, eye-catching design that uses minimal color, to conserve funds, and quickly delivers the general theme of the event.

I chose to use two different typefaces in this project. I wanted to use typefaces that would mix the structure and refinement of New York with more of a natural typeface representing the wildlife of Kenya. My first set or words as well as the information about the event were done in Optima. I chose this font because I feel it is a more refined sans serif; simple but elegant with flairs on certain letters. For the line “One Heart” I chose to use Handwriting – Dakota. As the name implies it looks as if it was handwritten giving it a more fluid almost wild feeling.

The visuals in my poster were all created with tools from Adobe Illustrator. The main focal point of the design is the elephant that I free hand drew with the Paint Brush Tool and a tapered stroke. The buildings were created with basic straight lines with the Line Segment Tool. Like the use of my two different fonts I used these two images to deliver the idea of two worlds intersecting. Both images are simple, but in different ways: The elephant is just a juxtaposition of lines but they are more organic and representative of the wilderness where as the buildings are ordered and even, just as a city truly is. I chose to use only two colors, the backdrop being a golden orange to relate to the vibrant nature of Kenya that contrasted with the wild flare of red in the text. Finally, I placed the organization’s logo in the upper right hand corner with a flourish of light coming from it as if to represent the sun shining down upon New York using the Flare Tool.