Architecture Poster Series

This project was created for one of my second year Graphic Design classes at the Ontario College of Art and Design. After spending several weeks researching nine different styles of Japanese Architecture I choose three to create poster for. The posters measure 24″ by 36″ and are intended to advertise exhibitions focused on those periods. Since the posters are quite large, and the creative commons and public domain images were of varying quality and resolution, I decided early on to go with an illustrative approach. Another stipulation of the project was that the posters must be printed in black and white (and grey). I knew I could create illustrations with high contrast using a stepped greyscale palette, while mitigating the risk of the greys blending together or becoming washed out.

One of my initial concepts was focusing on patterns within the architecture. Although I didn’t create block and repeat patterns as I initially planned, I did decide to focus in on the buildings, allowing them to fill nearly the whole frame of the poster. I also purposefully chose buildings with repetitive structures that create the suggestion of pattern when focused in on. This especially made sense within the context of Structuralism, which uses overlying systems to create order within smaller units, and the International Style, which relies heavily on large glass panels and windows, both of which contain a lot of repeating forms. Avant Garde has such a wide diversity of expressions, that it was also easy to find an example of interesting Japanese Avant Garde architecture that utilized repeating forms.

In order to unify the family I maintained the same stepped palette throughout, introduced a consistent skewed angle, and used uniform typographic styles, although the placement differs.

• Graphic Design
• Greyscale
• Illustration
• Illustrator
• InDesign
• Poster
• Print