3/27/09

A [Verbose] Campaign in Progress


Designed in Adobe Illustrator CS3; font: Anivers family (a very versatile, high-quality, and economic typeface; highly recommended)

Publicity materials for the Division of the Humanities' upcoming Spring Lecture Series. My employer was generous enough to allow me full control over the campaign's style, though I had no say over the copy, which was typically verbose. There was no predetermined motif; I interpreted the occasion as a part of a continuous dialogue, wherefore I settled on a more orthogonal variation of a Mobius strip. In hindsight, it's also a consciously concise counterpart to the weighty amount of text. Its parsimony also simplified any potential vignetting and formal direction.

The principal challenge came down to typesetting all that copy across various formats, including an unforgiving postcard with very, very little space.


Much cranium-scratching went into formatting this postcard, since I couldn't modify the copy itself to fit the space allotted. Still, I think that the typesetting managed to separate and distinguish each section in an intelligible fashion--achieved through a consistent hierarchy/system of weights, colors, leading, and paragraph spacing.


Transferring all that copy onto 11" x 17" presented its own challenges, mostly on account of the addition of four more lectures to the series. My original plan involved laying out the copy in rows with the date on the left and specific times on the right. The unexpected addition of four other lectures made that scheme untenable. Dividing the copy into three columns solved the problem. Though I preserved the basic hierarchy established in the postcard, my employer asked me to assign more prominence to the individual lecture titles instead of their respective series.


And finally, the 24" x 36" iteration of the flier (scaled down for web viewing), which was much, much easier to typeset.

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