Poster 1: The Fall of a Foe

#DES101 #process

To begin poster 1, I analysed the haiku and picked out the keywords that I believed the haiku represented. From there I picked the 3 that stood out the most to me which were death, triumph and rest. From there I created thumbnail sketches of geometric shapes in an attempt to show and represent these words. Certain thumbnails stood out more than others, however, an issue I faced was that although they represented the words, they did not correctly represent the haiku itself. So I believed that the poster that I would create would still need to have samurai or Japanese imagery.

I choose to go with death but wanted to link in honour and rest as well. These were some sketches I did at first to experiment around with the composition and shape and form of the samurai himself. However, I deemed this design to not properly be comprised of geometric shapes. As well as this I did not believe it correctly represented my word of choice.

My next sketch was based more heavily on the concept of death. I drew a skull using only triangles to fit both the requirement of being comprised of geometric shapes and and to include repetition. Initially, I only drew the skull to represent death but it did not represent samurais, so I added the helmet with sharp jagged edges to further represent the death of a foe.

This was the final poster I created for Poster 1, It has two main elements. The first is the skull and helmet, and the second is the dying cherry blossom. The helmet has a simple design with sharp edges comprised of large triangles. Whereas the skull is complex with lots of detail comprised of much smaller triangles. The reason for this design choice is that the viewer’s attention is drawn to the skull rather the helmet in its entirety. The black eyes, nose, and back of the helmet help create a simple border and outline to the skull that subtly draws the viewer's eye. I added a thicker outline to the key elements of the skull and the helmet to help the user differentiate the key parts. Keeping it grayscale, but adding the primary shading to the skull again helps the user focus on the skull.

The second element is the cherry blossom. In Japan, it represents the fleeting nature of life. A cherry blossom tree has a short life span, with the blossoms falling off after only two weeks of peak beauty. I chose to include this in the background of the image with its blossoms falling off to signify the end of the cherry blossom tree's life. I chose to also make it comprised of triangles rather than using circles or semi-circles to ensure it fits the theme of geometric shapes but also to create continuity between the skull and the tree.

The skull is on the left-hand side as typically an English viewer first focuses on things on the left-hand side due to the left to ride reading direction of the English language. Although the skull is supposed to be the main focus of the composition, having the cherry blossom with a larger size and darker body that draws the viewers attention across the poster from left to right, bottom to top, as if telling the viewer to keep their head up creates a sense of hope. This is similar to the samurai in the haiku saying 'Alas!', that although there has been death, the samurai must keep moving on.