In my graphic design class during my first year in Industrial Design, taught by the incredible Courtney Garvin, we had an assignment to create a poster for a fictional event related to a “maker” of our choice. I chose architect Bjarke Ingels, and inspired by his futuristic-looking and sustainable designs, I made the event an “astro-architecture” expo on the fictional Moon city, The Dome in the year 2074. I imagine that innovative architects like Ingels will lead the charge of sustainable architecture when humans inhabit other moons and planets (and it’ll make a cool poster), so this expo would celebrate that.
The first version of the poster was, frankly, horrendous. Just see for yourself– nothing good happened here. This was one of the first posters I’d ever made where text wasn’t the main focus and I chased the wrong angle without fully exploring other ideas. You can kind of see that I ran out of stuff to fill space with and started throwing logos and flags at it, which is never a good sign. We went through a round of feedback and I went back to the drawing board.
Instead of trying to show thriving people with stock photos, I realized I should focus on the part that matters: the Moon, and The Dome. I kind of liked the big all caps MOON text, so I kept that for a few iterations, then I started from scratch and realized that wrapping text around a circle, whether it be the moon or moon-adjacent, was way more visually interesting and looked way cleaner. I experimented with a few applications of this.
I chose the leftmost one in the middle row to finalize, but I wanted to bring back the green to show sustainability and here is the finished result:
