here’s a longer post to hopefully try and make up for the lack of updates. i’ve been busy but i made time to quickly work on this.

i came across this poster competition on the swiss miss blog and i thought it would be fun to enter. positive posters is a non-profit poster competition founded by nick hallam and run by volunteers. they basically just try and spread a good message through the competition. it started last year with the theme of change and this year’s is “a glass half full” from a more positive viewpoint.

i spent a few days on my daily commutes brainstorming. i won’t detail the concepts i didn’t follow through on but i decided early on that i wanted to keep things as simple as possible. the concept of polarity immediately jumped in my mind (being the nerd that i am) and so plus and minus signs were the images i wanted to use to reflect the positive and negative outlooks people can take on this classic saying.

here are some of the initial sketches. hopefully you can see some of the thought processes i (might have) had.

this is just a draft but the idea was to have the inked surface cover fifty percent of the poster but it’s probably not exact in the depiction above. the border wouldn’t have been there either, i just drew it on here to show the boundaries of the poster. rather than just plop a plus sign right in the middle or any other area, i thought about having it “float” in the liquid represented by the inked surface – ink…liquid…get it??? also, instead of the more obvious black and white, i went with magenta – slowly becoming a favourite colour for design. the brief reminded us about the fact that these posters should stand out in a cityscape because the winning poster will be printed 4000 times and plastered around australia. to keep things basic then, i wanted to stick with one of the CMYK colours since the nature of the poster is pretty basic. yellow and cyan don’t seem like they’d stand out so magenta it was.

sidenote: to try and validate the choice of colour, i looked up magenta and i found some interesting points. it’s an extra-spectral colour, meaning that it cannot be perceived with out two wavelengths of light. so it’s got that duality thing going on right? a bit of a stretch. more interesting though is the origin of it’s name. a conflict called – what else? – the battle of magenta in – where else? – magenta, italy occurred shortly before the discovery of the dye in that region. so that was kind of relevant to me – a negative conflict may have brought about something positive in the discovery of the dye and, you know, hopefully the conflict occurred to bring about positive consequences. validation? check.

anyway, the good thing about the plus sign is that no matter what orientation, it still looks like a plus sign. here’s the same version upside-down.

in the first version the plus sign is white and blends in with the background and in the flipped version, the liquid would be white and so it blends in with the liquid at that point. it’s pretty plain that the plus sign doesn’t seem so obvious. and in the inverted version, the liquid isn’t really filling half the glass. it gets worse in either landscape format.

the other idea i thought would’ve been interesting to pursue involved patterns of plus signs. i haven’t worked too much with patterns so i thought i’d try and take that a bit further. you can sort of see two attempts in the sketches but something jumped out at me for one of them. the plus signs in the positive space started to form minus signs in the negative signs in the negative space. this idea responded well with me for obvious reasons.

so for the second attempt, the abstraction of the half filled glass would be presented as a pattern of positive or plus signs that align to form negative signs in the negative space. rather than have the positive signs just cut exactly half the page, they’re staggered but the ratio of positive space to negative space is about equal. the staggering also helps lend to a layout where the positively spaced area is just slightly larger than the negative (i actually calculated it), which biases the outlook to the positive. also, the negative or minus signs are only really perceptible in landscape layout. either way, more plus signs are always visible than minus signs. so in those ways, the poster really is more positive than negative. the result is below.

and here’s the “inverse” version:

this version is kind of interesting because the plus signs seems to occupy the negative space and the opposite is true of the minus signs – so a bit of irony there. also, the minus signs seems to resemble drops falling into the magenta liquid – at least to me.

so why a tilted liquid level? well, here it is rotated. notice also that the minus signs are a bit more obvious.