Design: NOW Media Showcase

At the end of each school year, my program has exhibited a media showcase with a selection of student work created in the media courses of our two semesters. This year 4 classes were involved: Video Production, Alternative Media, Art & Activism, and Media Production – the biggest showcase yet. My Media Production course was in charge of organizing the event and publicity. Unfortunately I was away sick the week all of this was ironed out and when I came back there weren’t really more jobs to delegate. I noticed a poster had not been created yet and offered to come up with something.

This was an interesting exercise for me as the content had already been established and I worked inspiration out of what classmates had already done. One offered the set colour tone of teal, gray, and white; another had suggested word clusters and typographic design. I had about 4 hours of class time to do this from start to finish which pushed me to refine focus to the deadline.

The end result tried to balance the two main goals of our media program and the showcase. A marriage of media formats with the critical eye on global activism and social change.

I was working on my laptop for this project and thus only had Photoshop Elements at my mercy. For anyone who’s tried to work with text design in that program, you’ll know how frustrating it can be. I tried to use it more as a challenge to see what I could do. Though the layout of word clusters isn’t perfect, there’s a sort of organic feeling it creates.

I’m quite happy with how this came together and the challenge of being forced into a faster design process given a looming deadline.