DESIGN: International Women's Day Art Show "Eye to Eye"

After working on last year's International Women's Day Art Show promotional material, I had worked out a good system and work flow that made this year's process infinitely faster. Which ended up working in my favour given a much shorter deadline to work with this time around.

I was very lucky last year that the curator chose my piece to be the feature image on the promotional material for the Identity exhibit, and therefore I had time to sit and work with the piece and incorporating it into the card design. This year, we based the aesthetic on another artist - or rather artists - whose piece was not totally finished until a few weeks before the show opening. We were very excited to work with this multi-media painting by artists Patti Agapi & Meg Leslie as the story behind it fit in with our show as well as the dynamic textures and contemporary look to a seemingly traditional portrait piece.

After I was able to meet up with the artists and photograph the piece in its completion, I had a short period of time to think about how we wanted to present it. I didn't want to just plop the entire piece on a page with some text attached. I wanted it to be dynamic and intriguing with still an air of mystery. Again, after last year, this worked in our favour by only showing a small 'teaser' of the work that was featured on the promotion.

The eyes were very intriguing, which mirrored the theme well, but againy wanted some mysetery.

I played with cropping the piece down to ONLY the eyes, which was impactful, but lost a lot of the intersting parts of the image in the process. In the end this ended up on the back of the promotional cars where the text is heavier anyways.

For the front and main design, I cropped the face in half vertically and played with the text to play vertically. This immediately made it more interesting and forced the reader to take more time with it. I think the selling piece for me, was by offsetting the vertical cut of the image just off centre from the middle of the portrait's face. She seems to be almost peeking out onto the design.

By removing any type beyond the key text, and letting the image take over, this made a dynamic and unique design that has since transfered over to the poster and signage present at the Orillia Museum of Art & History.