Message and Delivery: Research

Development work

We began by writing down a statement/opinion or question that we wanted to show about our chosen article. 

Will it ever be possible that animals and humans will be able to talk to each other ? 

I decided that the posters needed to be light hearted, friendly.

It should be aimed at younger people and animal lovers. 

I started by writting down different words for communication, and then for understanding. I then began to write down and draw a few ideas for all three posters, I came up with some key priniciples for my posters. 

1. It would be blue and the stock only, blue is typically the colour for the sea, and a colour of a whale, it is also calm.
2. One of the posters needed to contain the question
3. The imagery/type had to convey ideas of speech and connecting.

I then came up with a range of 20+ visuals for each poster. I didn't do this in order as I drew it as soon as it came into my head so that I could explore everything. 

However I began to draw the ideas in sets of three as I wanted all the posters to connect and work together, this was also a requirement of the brief. 

I chose this idea as my final idea to begin developing my posters

I chose this image of the whale from google images as I felt it had a similar body position to the one I wanted to recreate in my posters. 

I began by creating the whale, I did this on illustrator by making basic shapes and lines.

I felt that this wasn't a good representation of the whale as it looked slightly like a duck and it looked unhappy and there was no real connection to speaking.

And so I found this image and I felt that this whale looked happy and because its mouth is open it also looks like its trying to speak. 

I moved on from the whale image and I began to crete the top poster which would contain the whales tail. Originally I drew out the tail and then droplets of water coming from it which also looked remotely like speech marks. I began by experimenting with putting words related to speech and communicating into the droplets of water.

I also experimented with the font. I looked at a wide variety of fonts, but to progress with my work I chose the middle font to try out my idea.

  I then made created lots of words

Using the Pathfinder Tool I put the type into the water droplet/ speech mark

I then tried this in context with the whales tail. I saved this idea for later as I wasn't too sure.

I did then also try a darker blue colour which I thought was  more reflective of the sea as it is a darker blue. I experimented with a brush tool which created vector like illustrations inside the droplets, I thought they too created water/ splash like aesthetics, they also added to the idea of nature.

I then thought about my type poster. I wanted the question to lead on from the copy as I felt it would make people read the copy first and realise what I was questioning and why.

I also put it to the right of the page and aligned it right as it would be the 'body' or connecting part of the whale, as well as this it is unusual and eye-catching. 

Again I experimented with a wide variety of typefaces , eventually I chose two which I felt looked natural and organic, they also looked simplistic and friendly, both where a light weight sans serif font and they worked with each other. 

I used the font which only contained uppercase glyphs as the question font, which made it almost work like a strap line. 
I choose the quieter lowercase font for the body copy as it isn't the most important part. 

However I made certain words in the copy bigger so that the main point of the copy would really come across this was 
"first animal"
"to talk"
"with humans"
which also read left to right like its own sentence

I then recreated the whales appearance using the second image of the whale I had found. I felt that this depiction looked a lot more like the whale as I had tried to recreate its facial features such as its 'melon' shaped head and its beak like mouth. This whale also looked like it was trying to talk as its mouth was open and it also looks happy/ friendly.

I had also changed the colours around in all the designs as the whale is actually white and as the its environment is the sea, then blue should be the background colour for all the posters. As well as this the white seems to stand out more from the blue rather than blue from the white and the posters have create impact and so it was more appropriate.

However I felt that the face of the whale still looked empty on its own after i had changed it,  and so using the same font I had used for the question I added the word 'HELLO' which created a lot more impact and engagement it was also clear the whale was talking.

I connected the type with the image as I felt it made it obvious that It was the whale that was speaking. But it also draws in your eye as the colours are reversed just like the illustration of the whales face.

And so I had to change the top poster which was the whales tail. This had to become my pure image poster. And so I used the same water droplets I had created. However I felt that the vector illustrations inside the droplets did not match the simplicity of the other two posters and so I had to revert the droplets back to a simpler form. I took the idea of reversing the colours to create detail within the droplets. I also added extra smaller droplets to the image just to make it a bit louder and livelier. 

I also added a droplet to the tail of the whale and really played with the reversal of the colour and it was supposed to look like water coming off the tail, just like speech from its mouth. The direction of the droplets also lead you to the poster below which is the copy. However the droplets where not obviously speech marks and so later in I changed to actual speech marks.

Final Posters

I printed my poster onto paper called antique white. As the paper didn't retain all the ink perfectly it created a nice textured appearance almost like water ripples in the sea. The colour of the paper was also quite warm and this made it feel friendly and light hearted.