Attracting new attendees to academic programming
Event Posters | Brown University, 2021–present
Communicating on campus
▸ The Challenge
The Cogut Institute for the Humanities at Brown University organizes or co-sponsors approximately 60 events on campus per year. Although publicity in the world today is almost exclusively digital, print posters remain a significant medium for promoting the institute’s events.
This is true partly because the institute isn’t a department with its own degree programs, meaning that it lacks a substantial 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 poster, I gather design ideas from multiple sources: the faculty members who are convening the event, 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 finalizing a single design.
With so many posters to design — among many other communications duties — I have relatively little time to devote to any single poster, but I gather insights from every project and implement new ideas on subsequent ones.
Developing a design lexicon
▸ Organizing Information
The institute’s events often have multiple speakers, are part of series, or have auxilliary sessions such as workshops for small 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 striking patterns and movement that guide a reader’s eye.
▸ Conveying Capacious Themes
The institute’s events also typically explore broad or complex themes with multiple scholars in dialogue across disciplines. But how can a designer illustrate things that can’t readily be summarized?
The annual “Collaborative Public Workshop,” for instance, is a showcase for collaborative, interdisciplinary research with a number of individual presentations on topics of the speakers’ choosing. No single concrete image could encapsulate this, so considering instead how this sort of research brings multiple methods to bear on shared subjects, I’ve developed abstract imagery suggesting overlap, interconnectedness, entanglement, etc.
Iterating within and beyond projects
▸ Drafting in Multiples
For every poster, 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 revisions. This helps me to identify viable ideas quickly.
The conveners of the colloquium “Why Me?” had no clear vision for a poster, but suggested mirror imagery, so I produced a series of drafts with different artwork. This helped the conveners to articulate a need for imagery avoiding indicators of race and gender, so I moved forward in that direction.
▸ 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 and refine patterns from past events and thus spend my time more effectively.
