World Music Wednesdays

As the first full-length assignment for Intermediate Typography, we were tasked with designing a poster for an annual event held by Chicago's Old Town School of Folk Music titled World Music Wednesdays. During the month of March, OTS offers free concerts every Wednesday of the month featuring world music and dance talents.

The objectives of this project were to establish a navigable hierarchy of information and to utilize typography expressively in relation to the event. All posters were composed at 20"x 30" in portrait orientation, with no more than two colors and a single typeface.

One concept that I was able to fully refine by the end of the project was to recreate visual motifs found in sheet music with typography. I originally considered this much more literally, and I intended to contain most of the information within "ledger lines" spanning the width of the canvas which would be further compartmentalized by vertical measure bars. However, it was concluded that the resulting composition would be bland and ineffective, and I was encouraged to explore the idea more dynamically.

The final iteration (fig.1) maintains the ledger lines as a motif, but instead suggests them through smaller type with generous leading. The dates of each concert (month/day) are included to the right of their respective descriptions as "time signatures", and lightweight vertical rules reinforce the visual metaphor as "measure markers".