Gig poster – Darren Clamp

I did a set of gig posters, each based on a phone doodle. Then I did a version of each without the doodle¹ with more emphasis on the type. Both versions shown above.

How did I get from 1 to 2?

• Attempted to morph the overlapping geometric shapes of the doodle to create letters.

Failure!

The mood of the posters is different. Obviously, a redesign is going to change things but I would have liked to have kept more of the style of the first poster.

The image in the first poster seems technical and complex; it could be an exploded diagram of a circuit board. The second poster feels more whimsical and decorative.

In the second poster, the separation of shapes into discrete letters means it doesn’t look as complex. The shapes are organised so your brain can understand it in a way that it can’t understand the first poster.² The shapes touch or overlap fewer other shapes so that the second poster doesn’t appear to have as many layers as the first.³

I could (possibly) fix this but I’ve posted it because failures are often more interesting than successes. This looked straightforward but turned out to be more difficult in practice.

1. That was the original idea. I did end up using varying amounts of doodle in some posters.
2. Which makes the first poster more interesting because your brain wants there to be order.
3. I tried overlapping shapes between letters but this made it too difficult to read.