Year: 2020
Employer: ELSI (Earth-Life Science Institute) is an international, interdisciplinary scientific research institute hosted by TITech (Tokyo Institute of Technology). TITech is a national research university and one of the most prestigious universities in Japan.
Tools: Adobe InDesign, Adobe Illustrator
Photo credit: Nerissa Escanlar
Note: Thank you to my former colleagues for providing the photos!
ELSI had a large open space at the ground floor entrance of its new building for a long time. It has big, floor-to-ceiling windows exposing it to all passers-by. ELSI wanted to attract more visitors and increase interest in ELSI, its science and its researchers by using this space to its advantage.
The Director of Science Communication had already planned to order three poster towers to put on display. I was tasked with creating three sets of posters (four per set) for each poster tower. Within each set, two posters were to be reserved for text with images and two purely for photos or graphics.
The text for the towers was recycled from existing material and there were strict branding guidelines to follow, which posed some challenges when it came to formatting the text to fit. All photos were from our in-house photographer.
All towers were done in ELSI red and I kept the ELSI logo large and centred at the top on the two text-heavy posters; all of which would fit ELSI's branding and attract attention from passers-by.
TOWER ONE
This tower was to introduce ELSI.
I needed to fit 3 images on this poster, two pieces of text and the names and titles of the president and former president of TITech. I was asked not to place their photos at different levels horizontally so as not to suggest they are of different levels of importance, so I placed them side by side and their names and titles in the centre aligned to each person's photo. I felt who is who may still not be clear enough, so I added the white lines above and below to draw the eye and create some division between sections.
I used drop cap speech marks in the English version, but speech marks in Japanese do not work so well with drop caps because they look like this: 「」. It also did some weird things with the formatting, making massive indents, so I removed them.
I also spent quite a lot of time playing with line spacing, line breaks and column breaks as well as text editing in order to ensure the text fit, did not violate any guidelines (quotes from individuals could not be edited) and was even enough between columns.
I carefully selected, resized and arranged the photos provided by Nerissa to fit neatly in a uniform-sized band across the photo posters for a clean, cohesive look that melded well with the text posters.
TOWER TWO
This tower was to introduce the researchers of ELSI.
I had to be very careful about the size and arrangement of the photos of researchers here. All of the material was taken from the ELSI Prospectus, in which blue boxes were used to clarify which quote belonged to which person. In this case, I wanted to keep the uniformity of the bold red background and the chequered pattern made by the photos. So I improvised and used smaller, thinner white lines to blend with the rest of my design. I originally wanted to place them directly under each quote, but since every quote is of a different length this would create a disjointed amateur look. Therefore I found the longest quote in each row, placed the white line evenly between the quote and the name, and aligned every other line in the row with this one to keep everything tidy and professional.
Another difficulty I faced with these posters involved the graphics on posters 2 and 4: those available from the prospectus were created by an external graphic designer in variations of ELSI red and blue (colour was uneditable in original .ai files), plus they looked far too blocky and hideous on such a large poster. So I used Illustrator CC to recreate every graphic myself to get the right size and colour that I preferred.
TOWER THREE
The final tower was to introduce the scientific research being carried out at ELSI.
The third and final tower was purely a question of arranging the text and photos just right, while attempting to make the English and Japanese versions look similar enough. I was pressed for time as I was preparing to move to the other side of the world, but I think it worked out all right!
Result
All posters were put on display in the entrance to ELSI in November 2020. Sadly, I was no longer there to see it in person, but the DO (stakeholders) were pleased with the results and ELSI continues to attract guests to public events.
