Museum Posters

OMG - Creativity has stalled!
That's not to say that the tap has run dry more of a kink in the pipe. I am doing stuff and trying stuff out. researching etc, but I am having difficulty collating what I have done and converting what I have learnt into a cohesive designscape and moving on. .

Plan B
I have decided to blog the story so far.

The Museum poster exercise, now, my initial thought was.. I am going to find this interesting, I was still on holiday in France and there were a couple of museums near by. However, having spent some not inconsiderable time on the previous exercise whilst out there, I decided enough, for the time being.
Having returned, a brief precursory look on the internet gave me an idea for an ideal exhibit, Masks!  I was on the British Museum website, seeking inspiration and I ended up in the masks section.
Masks have got legs I thought,Ha ha. Considering the age ranges, I could see no reason why this subject could not be made interesting in a variety of ways to cover all three age ranges.
My approach will be to engage the interest and hopefully inquisitiveness of the three audiences by exploring any link between the cultural and historic background of the exhibits with that of the present day.
My next port of call was to see what was on offer for the various ages, by way of marketing by Museums. Here are a few examples for the lower end of the age range:

http://www.londonchildrensmuseum.ca/

http://www.britishmuseum.org/explore/young_explorers1.aspx

http://www.thehigginsbedford.org.uk/

http://www.museumoflondon.org.uk/Schools/

My own observations from these and other sites are
Use of bold, mostly primary, colours.
Young children appear fascinated by other children of the same peer group, so images of children of the target age range are popular, particularly when shown participating in an activity.
The design can be quite busy and disorderly- visually stimulating. Of course these observations are based on website design but I think the basic ideas would be true of any design.

I did the same research on designing for teenagers.. A few pointers from inspirationfeed.com

Bright is beautiful
If there’s one thing teens absolutely abhor, it’s boredom. So a cardinal rule in designing for teens is to grab their attention, hold it and keep them engaged. Bright colors like orange, yellow, blue and green tend to work well while grays and blacks typically don’t. A simple, clear and intuitive interface is a must.

Act their age
Make sure you understand your audience. While you don’t want to bore your audience by being too adult, you also don’t want to use graphics, multimedia and language that’s remotely childish. Teens will run from a site with kiddie stuff even faster than sites that cater to mom and dad. Get some input from teens as you build the site and get feedback from users to help keep you on the mark.

Watch your tone
Teens look to the Internet for more than just entertainment and socializing. Whatever the content – style, sports, current events – it’s important to keep the tone casual and easy since an authoritative tone can easily turn teens off.

After a stuttering, thoughtful, but unfortunately non productive period...

Essentially my plan is to concentrate on what I believe is visually engaging to the key audiences, making three quite distinct designs. The link between them would be obviously the subject matter and what ever logo the institution would commonly use.
Some ideas... This brainstorming tackles the pre teens and teenager's versions

Some more ideas for the younger peoples design

The background marks would be the same image of a mask in differing orientations. For the youngest age range, I am investigating the use of face painting and making the connection between an every day children's party pass time and mask exhibits. In the mean time I also had thoughts about a cartoon boy holding a mask of his own face

Back to the face painting idea ..

I think with a little work this design could be workable.
Whilst thinking about the design to appeal to teenagers, I came across an image of a teenage hoody. It is quite striking and I thought straight away that I would like to build something around it. As long as I could capture the expression. It does have a stereotypical element to it, but I think if I handle it in the right way it will play this down.

As I find a lot of the time, looking for some inspiration for one aspect leads to a new angle.

In looking in to aspects of youth culture, I happened to be looking at graffiti, inevitably I came across Banksy and in particular the Gorilla and mask. Which can be seen here; http://www.artofthestate.co.uk/ Banksy/banksy_gorilla_mask _stapleton_road.htm
This gave me an idea to have my hoody teen wearing a similar mask. Giving the figure a slightly enigmatic quality and both concealing and in a sense ridiculing any percieved attitude
Now some thought about context.

Thinking about the adult version I had a look at some posters and adverts for cultural events in weekend supplements to try and get a sense of a sophistication of design. A thumbnail... my ideas are few a subtle and striking combination.. The mask I have chosen is quite striking and works well either complete and at an angle or as I have chosen to do show only half.

Modified and refined..

Playing with some additional ideas..

So where am I now? Re visiting the teenage version. I am keen to use the masked hoody idea but how to present it? The pre teen design is settled but again the composition is not totally defined in my mind. Are other images required? does this image do enough as it stands?

And a rough composition for the teen one..

Moving on to

T believe I have enough now to create a colour version of each of the designs, that is not to say that I won't make further alterations, refinements as I sketch out the designs. I am going to use water colour as the medium I feel relatively confident with it as opposed to other methods. I should just modify that statement my teen design is coloured by importing a scan into procreate and using fill layers.

The piece I have chosen to take to 'finished' poster is the teenage version. After considering all three designs again I decided that the figure of the hoody with the slightly ridiculous ball mask was strong enough to be the core illustration, and perhaps needed no more than some attention grabbing tag line.
Well here is my effort

I chose to do the whole layout by hand. I found a font called Freckle face but hand transposed it on to the design, I am not completely happy that I took enough care over it.
For some inexplicable reason I have found this particular exercise painfully long and laborious.