Client: The Department of Theatre and New Dance
Role: Illustrator and Visual Designer
Duration: January-May 2023
Background
For the past couple of years The Department of Theatre and New Dance were having their play posters designed by an outside graphic design company. However, the theatre directors felt the posters were lacking in design and creativity and weren't giving a sneak peek into what the play's story was just by the poster. In 2018 or so, the theatre department called upon the Visual Communication Design art department. They asked if the art students could design a play poster that the theatre department could use in promoting their next play. From January-May 2023, the art department designed four play posters for the upcoming plays in the 2023-2024 school year. One of them being for the play "The Lieutenant Nun".
Objective
This poster along with the other three, was a semester long project where there were constant revisions, editing, adding, deleting, class days where the head director of the theatre department would come in to talk and see our progress on the poster designs every so often.
Process
01 Research
Research Goal:
Read through the play and then search through images/inspirations from the play. While searching through reference images find some kind of key points from the play that tell what the story is about without giving too much away.
Research Objective:
1. Read through the play "The Lieutenant Nun" and ask questions about the play to the client in this case the theatre director to get a more deeper sense of what is the aesthetic of the play, etc.
2. Explore and use design elements with the use of any medium(photography, illustration, digital, Adobe Illustrator, etc.) to create a play poster for the theatre department.
3. Identify key elements or visual details from the play and find a way to weave those into the designing process and eventually the final design of the poster.
Market Research:
As for the market research of this project, the goal of research was to design and create a theater poster that would be hung up in front of a theater building or in this case hung up around campus and posted digitally on the Cal Poly Pomona website. So for me the main research focus was looking up theater poster that were being marketed towards theater audiences who would be interested in seeing the play based on the poster design itself.
02 Define
Background of Play:
The play tells the story of a Basque woman who fled from a convent in 1600, disguised herself as a man, and traveled to South America where she eventually became soldier in the Spanish army. As seen below in the progress photos, I kept the same concept design of using the inspiration of a playing card. I went with a playing card concept because the main character is a woman yet is posing as a man so she can be a soldier and go on adventures. She feels like a man trapped in a woman's body and so using that feeling I used a playing card showing both her nun persona and soldier persona.
03 Develop
Moving into the developing stage of this project I knew I wanted to play with the effect of a playing card. Like a playing car there are two sides of it and in this play the main character feels like she two has two sides, the nun she is forced to become and the lieutenant soldier she feels she's meant to be. So I very much throughout my process developments wanted to keep that feeling.
When our client (the theatre director) heard and saw that I wanted to go with this twist of using her in a playing card fashion, he was over the moon with all the possibilities I could show or do with a design such as this. And as shown below with all the process stage photos, I did many different techniques and styles such as hand drawn and then photographed that drawing, a burned edge one(that I actually burned) to give it that old 1600s feel that the play was written in, and even digitally which was the final version I presented the client.
(Concept sketch)
(Hand drawn drawing with burned edges effect)
(Version 1)
(Version 2)
(Version 3)
(Final Digital Version)
To go more in depth with version 1, 2, and 3 each have different variations to them because I was playing around mostly with the color scheme. Since this play is Spanish and set in Spain, apart of my development process research was connecting Spain with the color red. Plus, red is that color that is an attention seeker color and makes the overall composition just pops. There were some drafts and versions where I went too dark with the font color choice and s it would be hard to see through the dark black background so I decided to try some lighter versions. In the development stages what remained consistent was the red marquee coloring. What didn't stay but did develop and grow was the concept, mediums, and techniques used when developing this poster further for the client.
04 Outcome
As for the outcome of the project, no it did not get voted for the final poster for the theater department however the client and the professor who was our client as well were very happy with the fact that there I was able to produce varying and different versions of the same concept of the playing card.
And as the illustrator designer of the poster, it is safe to say that I too was proud of the growth and development this poster went through throughout the duration of the project for the client. The more we worked on this project and the more feedback I got from the client did indeed help the process stages of developing it further for the next time the client would be in to see the progress of our poster designs.
(Finalized version of the play poster)
