Digital development of crossword poster

Digital development of crossword poster 

After receiving positive feedback on this visual presented in the crit I went forward with digitally producing the design. 

Feedback suggested to keep with handwriting due to the imperfections within the aesthetics of hand rendered type creating nice visuals so I went with this producing a neater version and more simplified version without the information about the novel simple simon. 

 The handwriting also had more connotations with a child rather than more corporate style digital typography which has a more mature aesthetic in my opinion.

I created 2 weights of the type to play around with in the digital stage. 

Background removed. 

Placed on a white background, nice and clean and reasonably legible for hand rendered type. The inspiration as mentioned before is based on a crossword but the aesthetics have been simplified down with the bounding boxes removed to create a simple visual outcome.

I found it hard to decide on what weight worked best.

So I combined the both with contrasting colors, the red also has connotations with danger and action so this felt like a relevant color to use. I liked the 3D sort of visual that was given off but it sort of hindered legibility of the glyphs. 

I thought I could capitalize on this illegibility to use it as a highlighting point to highlight the film name. This worked a little better than above but the lightweight typeface didn't really balance well within the composition and the contrast of the heavier weight hand rendered letterings. 

Using this red hue that linked with action and danger I went back to trying out both weights of handwriting on there own. 

Again i found it hard to decide on the better outcome so combined them both in a different way. This time the heavier weight writing was used to highlight out the film title. I liked this contrast of heavy and light weights more than the pervious contrast of color and type weight that created the 3D effect. 

Filling in the imperfections. 

As I mentioned in the development stages the material mercury is silvery in color so this gave me opportunity to use metallic inks, I simulated this through photoshop and it works nice as a color for the type but due to the light tonal background and the small contrast between the type & background difficult readability was the problem.

As it was the lighter weight letterforms that hindered readability I changed these to the red color. This aided readability and also created a nice contrast between the silver type and created a nice balance of tonal ranges. 

It was suggested to use reversed out type in the crit. I tried this out but it resembled a chalk board a little too much and this didn't really have good links with decoding and coding which is more computer based, a chalk board is very traditional way of communicating and it kind of hindered the concept of a digital based storyline. 

The red before was too bright and luminance in its tone. So i dulled the shade down a little creating a more pastel tone and a more maroon tone. This worked a little better but again the contrast between the lightweight letterforms and the background became a problem. The letterforms formed an illusion of been even thinner on this background for some reason. 

I created a 50-50 split on the background, exposing the majority of the lightweight letterforms in the white half wich created a better contrast for the letterforms to be read easier but as a whole the design wasn't very aesthetically pleasing. 

To combat this I changed the light weight typeface to black. Now there is a better contrast between the background and the lightweight letters creating more readable typography. The black and the silver also contrast nicely within there tonal range. And as a whole a nice balance is achieved between these 3 colors. There is a consistent tone overall with no design elements overpowering each other too much creating a nice balanced piece of design. 

My opinion though I don't like this, it doesn't really communicate the storyline very well, yes it kind of communicates word puzzles which has relevance to the storyline of simon cracking a government code through a word puzzle. But the overall aesthetic too it suggests a film that doesn't really include a technological synopsis.