POSTER ARTICLES

Poster design
 

Sheer size is the design aspect that sets posters apart from most print vehicles. The luxury of having such a large space to fill is a very exciting prospect. After all, this form of message expression can actually be found hanging in art galleries throughout the world. That makes it as close as most graphic designers get to doing fine art to satisfy a commercial goal.
Such a creative situation deserves every chance of blossoming into something special. With a bit of supplied copy and thoughtful input from the art director, an experienced designer should be left alone to render a masterful solution.
This and other observations are the result of work related notes that I began writing to myself a few years ago. I hoped such an effort would help me retain the gist of what I learned along the way about graphic design. Early on, the act of presenting a portfolio to potential employers had impressed upon me the importance of being able to precisely identify my contribution to a project. In addition, I wanted a record that could help me focus on each experience as it related to specific creative functions. After much confusion, the realization had finally come home that while creative direction, art direction, design, illustration and writing were all indispensable parts of the creative process, they are also quite different. I needed some sort of reference that would help me understand how they and their providers could best work together.
Attention to such details has resulted in many of the mini-articles you'll find herein the Creative Ideas Articles section of this Web site. They also serve to help me focus on the assignment(s) at hand and my role in it as described by a job originator. All it takes is a quick look at the appropriate articles to put myself in a productive frame of mind based on past experience. On this site, in both the Creative Ideas Sections and in my portfolio, you'll find samples and descriptions of the work that has brought me to the conclusions I've expressed here and there.
What remains of extra special interest to me is discovering how experts in each of the creative disciplines can relate most productively to each other as indiviuals, and to the client as a group. As most anyone who's ever been involved in the creative process will tell you, a universally accepted standard for developing communicative concepts is yet to be established. Important creative decisions continue to be made based on politics and personal taste. I believe this is because the creative community has yet to educate our clients, not to mention each other, about how the creative process should work.
Seldom do we even tell clients what's expected of them. Which is, to simply find any great big obvious mistakes that we missed because we're not experts in their business. Instead, we present tons of work, often in such a way that employers assume they are supposed to react to every creative nuance. This is the kind of dangerous conclusion that usually causes serious damage to any well-conceived concept. That's our business, so it should be a given that we know what we're doing and are prepared to stand behind every creative characteristic down to the smallest detail.
It is no myth that many great ideas end up in the round file. That egos can retard progress to a degree that both execution and efficiency are compromised. Further, without a great deal of experience marketing one's own business, who could know that a communicative idea is worth very little without commitment, follow through and adherence to the existing brand? These are the kinds growing pains that need to be overcome before ad agencies and self-promoters can perform with maximum efficiency.
To my mind, affordable and effective promotion is attainable by every level of business. In the vast majority of cases, one cohesive successful strategy can and should be developed, upgraded and nurtured for years to come. Such a potential is inevitable once the creative functions are understood and the importance of working within the limitations of their intended purposes is accepted. That's what the Creative Ideas Section of IdeaSiteForBusiness hopes to help accomplish.
In a like manner, the Marketing Ideas Section instills know-how and confidence from a marketing point of view. Mary Gillen, co-creator of ISFB, has been writing, collecting, organizing and distributing these targeted ideas and articles since 1996.