Tuesday, February 7, 2017

Design Presentation

For this assignment I had to choose something near and dear to my heart. Movies. More specifically, movie posters and the advertisement around new releases, especially big block-buster titles. When I look at a design for a movie poster one of two things happens. I get excited about this new movie and instantly look up the trailer, or I see it and I'm not interested. All of this happens in three seconds. This relates back to the visceral response that we get when we see something. That shock and awe factor. I thought a good movie poster to choose for this assignment would be one that is highly anticipated because of it's history and legacy that it already holds. The new King Kong movie.

Good Design
   
     This design is really pleasing on the eyes with it's more dark muted pallet, but it has those few pops of color that draw the eye. Particularly the eye is drawn straight to King Kong himself with the bright bold colors above his head. All of the lines in the design also lead straight to him. The soldiers in the formation of an arrow literally point straight to him, the helicopters help to further enforce that focal point of the poster. The reason that his poster is so effective is partly because of the legacy and history that this movie has. King Kong is a classic. With the lines drawing your attention straight to the looming figure in the back, you instantly know what movie this is going to be before you read the title. The law of proximity comes into play with the soldiers and the title creating a triangle that is pointing to the thing we're suppose to look at. The law of closure helps us to further recognize that the figure is King Kong.

Bad Design

     The design does a few things very well. It creates a good contrast with color to capture your attention with the green smoke, which is the only color used really in the design. It also makes you question what is going on right when you see it, which forces you to dissect the design and keeps it in the back of your mind. This would be a great poster to use as the very first one in the campaign. One that introduces the concept but doesn't show anything and leaves it up to the imagination of the audience to figure out the specifics. The way that it is a bad design is that you can't really understand what is going on. From far away this would be an impossible poster to read. It would look like a gray cloud with a green streak running through it. It is hard to find any gestalt principles within this design. While this may not be a terrible design by itself in comparison to the one above it is. They both go to the same audience but this design is just too dark to see what's going on. The figure of King Kong just isn't as effectively used here as it is in the first design.