Patricia Mc Carthy~🎈✨🦡

PDF of final festival poster and final statement-

The festival in which I had chosen to bring my project to fruition is “The Liverpool Christmas ice skating festival” as I have a personal connection to ice skating as I have gone ice skating several times myself with my friends and I treasure those experiences.

Festivals are an event that focus on an atmosphere of electric energy, passion, and a celebration of expressing oneself. I wish to express my passion of ice skating as well as the joyful atmosphere and spirit which this festival invokes in people both young and old. This festival celebrates diversity and inclusivity of every gender, nationality and age. Ice skating is inclusive and is a worldwide phenomenon, where anyone can join and put on a pair of blades.

Festivals are also a way of bringing people together, friends and families enjoy the sheer joy of attempting to skate around the rink and inevitably fall over due to their lack of experience in ice skates, myself included, as I have many memories of this happening to both my friends and I! I intend on creating a poster which reinforces this message of celebration and belonging!

The diverse range of people that are brought together by this festival is beautiful, my target market of this project is towards all ages and people of various nationalities and gender!

I made sure to have the location of the festival (Liverpool) clearly emphasised in the poster through both the logo of the landmark (pier head) and through typography so potential viewers would be able to know where the event was held and also I used a clear font for the opening times and prices so the information was communicated in an accessible, easy to understand manner.

Reflection on project-

Posters and book covers which inspired my festival poster due to the spiral motifs:

Skate: the wonderful world of ice skating in prose,

poetry and pictures

Edited by Meredith Collins

Pighog Press, 2012

ISBN 9781906309794

Saul Bass: https://www.kingandmcgaw.com/prints/saul-bass/vertigo-426920#426920::air:25_frame:880608_glass:770007_media:1_mount:108649_mount-width:0_size:492,618 Vertigo framed art print

Phantom City Creative inc. Back to the future 2 redesign

By graphic designer

Man made spiral I saw yesterday in the peoples park, repetition of lined pattern, circular shapes and curvilinear motifs. An example of graphic design communication-

Winter festival posters research:

Both effectively communicate the festival’s locations, ethos, target audience and events while creating a mood of festive joy through quotes/

The typography is easy to read for viewers due to its simplicity and large font

I enjoy the colour scheme in each from the colourful hues of the Whitby poster to the more subdued palette in the south Australian winter fest poster.

The links to website and social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram in these posters are extremely important in marketing so viewers can learn more information as well as being broadcasted to a broader dynamic of people and this helped me realise how significant communicating an idea is by making it as accessible as possible.

Viewing these posters helped me to understand how I needed to create my layout for my festival poster and understand the components of a graphic design poster: At its core, a poster is made up of four key features: a title, graphic(s), text, and white space. Layout, flow, and color affect the order and style of these four key features. Graphic design components are: Font, Creating a Balanced Design, Color, The contrast in poster design, Poster design hierarchy, Shapes, Grids & proximity

Illustration poster, use of geometric snowflake shapes and simplicity capture style and concept of film “Frozen”. I felt I achieved a similar effect in my own poster.

Another poster which uses illustration and a repetition of pattern with geometric shapes to form a unique layout and various forms.

Emphasis on geometric shapes, symmetry and balance within this poster, this really inspired me when I was creating my final festival poster aa I used geometric spinales and spirals as my central elements.

I researched the artist Louise Bourgeois as I found her work featuring spirals very significant as a focus of my festival poster was the spirals created by ice blade marks. I recently saw her work in the hunt museum and it was very engaging as it completely drew in my attention the moment I walked into the exhibition so I decided to research her furthur to find out more about her relationship with spirals. I also really enjoyed her modern style of art and use of shape and form.

Featured below is my short analysis of Louise Bourgeois and her use of spirals and geometry forms.

The spiral appears frequently in both Bourgeois’s sculpture and her work on paper, including in A l’infini 2008–9 (Tate AL00357), where the spiral is representative of an endless natural cycle. Specifically, the spiral is often used by Bourgeois to represent the constant continuation of birth, life and rebirth, sometimes associated directly with motherhood, as can be seen in Nature Study 1986 (Tate AL00228). Bourgeois explained her repeated return to the imagery of the spiral:

The spiral is important to me. It is a twist. As a child, after washing tapestries in the river, I would turn and twist and ring them. The spiral – I love the spiral – represents control and freedom.

Reference taken from “Gardner” 1994, p.68. (Accesed on the 29th of April 2022).

According to Louise Bourgeois the spiral represents the abstract concepts of control and freedom as well as being invested with a personal symbolism. The sense of the artist exerting a level of control over her work is compounded by the decision to display the prints in a grid formation. The use of the grid is also a common feature of Bourgeois’s works on paper and is considered to be a reference to her training in geometry at the Sorbonne, the study of which had a direct impact on her artwork: ‘My minimalism came from my love of geometry. Sometimes it is inherently dynamic: a study of conflicting forces, which is never static’ (quoted in Frances Morris (ed.), Louise Bourgeois, exhibition catalogue, Tate Modern, London 2007, p.148). The use of both free-flowing (loose) and precise spiralling lines in Spirals could also be a reference to the duality of control and freedom as described by the artist.

Principles of Gestalt Psychology - fundamentals of graphic design

Gestalt psychology helped introduce the idea that human perception is not just about seeing what is actually present in the world around us. It is also heavily influenced by our motivations and expectations.

The human brain is exceptionally good at filling in the blanks in an image and creating a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts. It’s why we see faces in things like tree leaves or sidewalk cracks.

This principle is one of the most important underlying ideas behind the gestalt principles of visual perception. The most influential early proposal written about the theory was published by Max Wertheimer in his 1923 Gestalt laws of perceptual organization,

Wertheimer created principles to explain how Gestalt perception functions. Some of the most important principles of Gestalt theory are-

Prägnanz (symmetry and balance): This foundational principle states that we naturally perceive things in their simplest form or organization.

Similarity: This Gestalt principle suggests that we naturally group similar items together based on elements like color, size, or orientation.

Proximity: The principle of proximity states that objects near each other tend to be viewed as a group.

Continuity: According to this principle, we will perceive elements arranged on a line or curve as related to each other, while elements that are not on the line or curve are seen as separate.

Lines

Lines are always more than just points that are strung together. Depending on their form, weight, length and context, lines can help organize information, define shapes, imply movement, and convey emotions.

Lines can be:

Horizontal, vertical or diagonal.

Straight, curved or freeform.

Zigzag or create other patterns.

Solid, broken or implied.

For the purposes of graphic design, shapes are best understood as areas, forms or figures contained by a boundary or closed outline. There are two types of shapes that every graphic designer should understand: geometric and organic (or “free-flowing”).

Geometric shapes example-

Furthur conceptual research on ice and inspiration for my project through poetry-

2014

Our graphic design class was fortunate to get the chance to have the visiting lecturer/ graphic designer Shane O‘Riordan.

He gave our class an encouraging lecture about the essentials of graphic design and how important research is in your ideas development and why it’s fundamental to effectively communicate the poster‘s message/ advertisement in a simplistic manner.

Featured below is an example of his unique graphic design communication-

Designed by Shane O'Riordan at Boys and Girls

Categories: Editorial

Industry: Commercial

The company Digicel approached Shane O’Riordan to create an image to pay tribute to life of the legendary Muhammad Ali.

Shane wanted to create a piece that would sum up his wonderful characteristics and his ability. The solution was to take his inspirational quote "float like a butterfly sting like a bee", and visualise it in a way that was instantaneous to the viewer, while paying respect to Ali.

He created a hybrid insect using the body of the bee and wings of a butterfly, this was then placed into a museum style preservation case to highlight his distinct personality.

Article linked below-

I enjoy the organic forms and repeating patterns on the butterfly‘s wings and the sense of balance created due to the symmetrical design on the wings. The geometrical striped line pattern on the bee was also another exciting element which catches the eye of the viewer.

Photoshopping the poster into various mock ups to demonstrate how the festival poster would appear to the public/ target market. I edited this using Adobe spark (creative suite) and also adding shadows to add a 3 dimensional aspect to it through using the app Bazaart.

Spirals, patterns and organic shapes research- important features of my work. Primary images I took of spirals featured in nature.

The repetition of pattern can be clearly seen on the coiled spiral shell of the snail and the spiral shape in the centre of the rose is surrounded by curvilinear petals.

I enjoyed investigating patterns seen in nature and thus I then incorporated similar patterns throughout my graphic design work.

Organic shapes are far less uniform, proportional and well-defined. They can be symmetrical or asymmetrical. They might include natural shapes, such as leaves, crystals, and vines, or abstract shapes, such as blobs and squiggles.

People often equate rounded edges and rings with positivity, community, love, friendship, and harmony. Squares and rectangles can suggest balance, dependability, and strength. And triangles have cultural associations with science, religion, history, civilization, and power.

Developing my final festival poster-

I used a variation in shapes, background colour, font and elements. The double spiral element changed to singular spirals after I chatted to my lecturer Lorraine who gave me helpful advice and guidance on how I could improve and develop my composition furthur. This layout helped to create a sense of movement and create an image of the decorative blade mark patterns that are left in the ice after ice skating.