Y Design Blog

This year’s Lohmann Prizes were chosen last Friday. The Prizes, which celebrate excellence in undergraduate printing and design, were awarded to eight students. All of the judges noted that this year’s submission pool was particularly strong. We had a hard time choosing the winners!

This bright poster caught my attention as I walked across Cross Campus this morning. Its neon colors (and the gradients formed by their transitions) are unlike the familiar agglomeration of so many sheets of plain text on copy paper and photographic-toned images. It is perhaps the only poster on this bulletin board printed full-bleed (the color extends to [and, conceptually, beyond] the edges of the paper)—note how there’s no telltale white border around its edges, which marks most of the other posters as having been printed on standard letter-size paper likely off of a cluster printer. Most importantly, one compositional element dominates the picture plane: in large and roughly hewn lowercase, the letters “xs” dominate without explanation or apology. All supplementary information is relegated to small black text at the poster’s top and bottom margins. The designer was rightly confident that the poster itself would serve as a point of entry for the viewer.

I’ve noticed a number of striking student-designed posters around campus in the past month or so. The posters, seen below, are distinguished by their strong use of image with type (in some cases, the type itself is the image) and the presence of negative space (type and image alike have plenty of “room to breathe”). Obvious editorial consideration—the distillation of information down to its most essential elements—allows color and form to dominate the page, making for effective advertisements.