Gestalt Branding and Posters - Week 3B

In my previous post, I talked about three theories: Saussure's theory, Barthe's theory and Gestalt's Theory. All three theories covered different areas but still, they had pretty similar elements. Nevertheless, in this post, I'm going to specifically focus on Gestalt's theory and actually how it can be used. There are six key characteristics of this theory: similarity, continuation, closure, proximity, figure/ground, symmetry and order.

Before I show the final products, I want to explain how I created the following posters. At first, I didn't realize that we had to create posters based only on Gestalt Branding and therefore, I ended up making a couple of posters out of pure creativity. Of course, this mistake was made due to the fact that I wasn't in class and also I didn't understand the exercise correctly.

After I realized what we have to do, I tried to make posters for Instagram, one of the most popular social media platforms of the last 10 years. From researching their post campaigns, usually in most of their promotional content, they have plenty of graphics and emojis in order to make them more playful and cheerful. They rarely make something that is minimal and simple, so I guess this is the perfect chance to create something out of the ordinary.

I based this design on an Apple poster that had a similar structure. Thus, Instagram, almost two years ago, changed its logo from black to a colourful polaroid sketch so I thought it would be a good opportunity to use this change. This is by far the most symmetrical poster that I made. The rest of the posters that are going to follow have different elements and they are loosely based on Gestalt's theory.

Next, I experimented with other styles:

I find this poster extremely minimalistic and afterwards, I started altering it and adding different elements.

  

However, I didn't start with Instagram. At first, I wanted to create a poster for Lenovo. I did some research on its campaigns and they had some really strong and good content.  From what I found out some of them were really minimal and some of them really colourful and bright. Nonetheless, I stumbled upon its later campaign called smarter and which picked up interest.

After watching this video, I ended up making this poster:

In this poster, the A is replaced by a woman swimming towards the surface of the sea. It was really difficult to actually find a figure that would have this specific body language. After I cleaned the background, I put colours around the girl so that when I blend the layers I will be able to have the colours show.

Reflection

Making posters was one thing that I didn't expect to actually enjoy doing. At first, I was so confused as to what I should do and I'm not going to lie it was really hard to find inspiration. However, once I started understanding what we are asked to do and started planning, ideas started flying through. Also, researching campaigns from different companies was vital for this task but still, it was an interesting process because you never know what kind of creations you are going to find or come up with by looking around and learning new things. 

Even if I managed to do all the posters and the reading by myself, it would be so much better if I was in class because I would be able to ask questions if I had any. This task helped me reflect on how important it is to be able to ask for guidance and how necessary it to be present at all the lectures. It might not add up to this point but I just wanted to get this out there. 

Thank you for looking at my posters and reading my post! :)