Buy Nothing Day 2008

The project I am going to talk about now was based heavily, if not entirely on typography and layout and the power of type within graphic design.

For me typography plays a very important role in my design style, I am a very big fan of using type itself as the imagery and focus of a piece of work. Not in the sense that you just spell out your message but in an artistic manner which uses the forms of the letters rather than just using them to construct words.

By positioning them to work with each other you can produce a fantastic piece of work which not only contains all the relevant information but attracts the eye of the viewer by being inventive and experimental.

The Buy Nothing Day project involved working

with type alone to work towards and produce a poster advertising either FOR or AGAINST Buy Nothing Day (an event organised by AdBusters, www.adbusters.org).

To begin with, as in any project, I sketched out letter forms and experimented with all sorts of ideas such as cutting and pasting them to create new forms, tracing and over-laying and looking at ways in which letters interact with one another.

Before I could get anywhere near to creating a poster, I had to research the event and AdBusters to get a feel for their brand name and what they aim to do. I found most all of their a

dvertising material used bright colours which unfortunately I could not use as this project had to have a black and white outcome.

However this made the outcome fresh especially for their usual methods of design.

The brief explained how the poster had to be fully typographic with no images used which gave the project a new angle as I'd never worked purely with type before. This gave me an opportunity as mentioned before to create imagery out of the type itself.

I explored ideas using different angles and positioning, different sizes and weights of letters to design and put together something fresh and slightly out of the ordinary.

I established a hierarchy of elements and put them in order of importance, I then used the sizes of the words to indicate this order to draw attention from the viewer in a particular way as you can see in my final outcome below.