OUGD505 - Studio Brief 01 - Leeds Public Spaces - Development

Before developing ideas digitally I needed to consider the use of colour, typography and layout.

In terms of colour, I made a colour scheme by gathering the most common colours worn at the Carnival. To do so, I Google searched 'West Indian Carnival' and picked the 6 most prominent colours seen. The resulting colour scheme made can be seen below. As the West Indies is a region of the North Atlantic Ocean containing multiple countries, I was not able to analyse the colours in terms of their cultural meanings. As red is commonly associated with danger and violence I chose to not use this colour in the development stage however. As all the Carnival posters analysed were very bright in colour, the 5 colours seen below were appropriate to use.

In terms of typography, I also referred back to the analysis made of previous Carnival posters. As they all use sans-serif fonts, I chose to select a few that are similar to those analysed, in order to keep consistency with the theme of previous years. Two very similar typefaces as those seen in the posters are Din Pro Bold and Futura Std Heavy. The previous Carnival posters all use uppercase type, and tend to be either white or a bright colour. Furthermore, the contrast between the type and imagery/illustration is strong, to ensure that legibilty is good. These aspects were all considered when producing the variety of digital posters.

In terms of layout, previous Carnival posters have very thin margins. This allows information to be displayed as largely and clearly as possible. Following the consistent theme seen on the right, I used very thin margins and minimal white space in my poster designs.

Whilst these choices may seem very simple, they were entirely informed from the Leeds West Indian Carnival and its past designs.