Introduction:
Who would have thought that a travel poster might accurately represent an area and still be appealing? We sure didn’t, after all the exact purpose of advertising is to make something look better than it actually is. However, the Arrupe leaders summit is not about seeing things as we would like them to be but, seeing things as they actually are. Our poster represents that by portraying the Bay Area in its foggy but nevertheless beautiful nature.
Ideation / Inspiration:
For Ideation we started by asking ourselves what about the bay area was iconic and what instantly came to the conclusion that it was the golden gate bridge. We therefore, found it necessary to include the Golden Gate bridge but we did think that just the bridge would be too cliche. After some looking we found many WPA style posters representing the Bay Area. What we found in these examples was that they all focused on some iconic part of the Bay Area or another city. We then though that it would be best to take one of two
Sketches:
For our sketches we knew that we wanted the foreground to be of the town area of San Francisco leading up to Coit Tower, however we didn't know what we wanted to do with the background. We worked with placing the text on different areas of the image as well as placement of the Golden Gate Bridge. Finally we came to the conclusion to put the Golden gate towards the left side of the image and the text to the right of that above Coit Tower.
Posters through the process:
These are the phases we went through in the design process ton come to our final product. In each poster we applied a similar filter to simplify the colors down to achieve a silk-screen look to the photo. We wanted to do this as to not distract from too much detail in the image. At first we wanted to utilize Coit Tower in the foreground as a mask for the text behind but as we started tweaking and adding the Golden Gate in the background we found that the text looked much better without it. We then moved into the background and added a mask on the background to make it one singular color as we thought the transition from gray to beige to look really odd. Finally we changed to a Sans Serif font as the prior one too cartoonish for us, edited the sizing to make the text fit snugly together, and added a fog layer to simulate the reality of how the Bay Area almost always looks.
Final Project:
From the outset we were hoping to create something different. After all, this trip is nothing like any normal vacation to San Francisco. We wholeheartedly believe that our poster represents the real Bay Area not the one that they want you to see. The summit hopes to promote leadership and understanding and fog is a fact of life for the denizens of the Bay Area. How can we hope to understand a places people if we can’t even understand their weather.
