Attracting new attendees to academic programming
Event Posters | Brown University, 2021–present
Communicating with an on-campus constituency
▸ The Challenge
The Cogut Institute for the Humanities at Brown University organizes or co-sponsors approximately 60 events per year, targeting mostly students and faculty on campus. Although promotion for these is managed largely electronically, print posters remain a significant medium.
This is true partly because the institute isn’t a department with its own degree programs, meaning that it lacks a large captive audience. Posters serve to attract the attention of new students and others on campus who aren’t yet involved with the institute.
▸ My Process
For each event, I gather poster design ideas from one or more sources: the event conveners, the abstract of the speaker’s talk, blurbs for the speakers‘s books, etc. Then I produce several drafts and share them with my team for feedback, before revising and finalizing a single design.
With so many posters to design — among many other communications projects — I have relatively little time to devote to any individual poster, but I gather insights from every project and implement new ideas on subsequent projects.
Developing a design lexicon
▸ Organizing Information
The institute’s events often have multiple speakers, come in series, or have secondary sessions such as workshops for smaller audiences. Posters thus require large amounts of text or multiple sets of details, making it difficult to create striking designs and convey information hierarchy.
However, careful use of fonts, text sizes, colors, and graphic elements can create visually appealing patterns and movement that guide a reader’s eye.
▸ Conveying Capacious Themes
The institute’s events also typically explore themes or subjects from multiple angles and in nuanced ways in order to spark dialogue among scholars across disciplines. But how can a designer illustrate things that can’t readily be summarized?
The annual “Collaborative Public Workshop,” for example, has the broad theme of collaborative, interdisciplinary research. No single concrete image could suggest this, so considering instead how such research brings multiple methods to bear on shared subjects, I develop abstract imagery suggesting overlap, interconnectedness, entanglement, etc.
Iterating within and beyond an individual project
▸ Drafting in Multiples
For every poster project, I create multiple drafts, or a single draft with multiple color or typographical variations, to share with my team and other stakeholders so that they can choose favorites or suggest alternatives. This helps me quickly to identify viable ideas.
The conveners of the colloquium “Why Me?” had suggested imagery involving mirrors, so I produced drafts using different mirror art. When I shared these, the conveners had a clear preference for imagery that avoided indicators of race and gender, so I moved forward with that.
▸ Refining Over Time
Given my time constraints, at some point a poster simply has to be good enough to print, even if I’m not completely satisfied.
But in working on posters over time, I experiment and discover better practices that inform new projects. This is especially true of posters for events in a series, where I can more easily adapt patterns from past events and spend my time more effectively.
