The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals, on a wet, black bough.
- Ezra Pound 'In The Station of the Metro'
I started off doing some thumbnail sketches of designs I had in my brain. I had the initial idea of using circles to represent people moving in the Metro. I showed these sketches to my friends at Uni and settled on developing the bottom left one. I at first attempted to use the golden ratio but then settled on rule of thirds. You can still see evidence of some aspects of golden ratio such as the curving of the path. I wanted to communicate the contrast shown in the haiku between the Metro and nature.
Before I jumped into doing it traditionally I did a sketch in Photoshop. I wanted to make sure that the design was good before I tried on paper with paints, as I find it harder to correct traditional work. After showing this design to a few design and non-design friends, I concluded a few things: The circles came across as more 'organic' than 'geometric' which was in the requirements. The white circle in the top left representing the 'outside' looked more like the circles representing people. It also wasn't clear what was going on. I created a new - albeit crudely - done design that i presented to my design lecturers that was better received. You can see this below.
In this design the circles are separated by tone, and the 'outside circle's shape was changed. I added a block of black to represent a wall to reinforce the idea of the circles moving somewhere. The implied stairs was given by one of my design friends. I am more confident with this design, and when doing the traditional version I was keen to have more contrast between the closer circles and the further away ones with increased tone and size variation.
These sketches were done before isolation. Before isolation I was intending to use watercolour and acrylic paints to achieve the traditional version. However, since isolation, my materials have been limited. I had to resort to what I could find around the house, which included: watercolour pencils, a grey marker, a white gel pen, and charcoal for the black. I also managed to find some masking tape in order to protect certain shapes. I was also forced to downsize on my paper, so this poster is done on a 20 x 20cm q
This is the final poster
As the poster was photographed in natural light photo brightness and contrast has been edited. Nothing else has been touched.
