Educational Poster for Urban Agriculture

Visually surprising and stimulating design rarely go hand-in-hand with the standard 24" x 36" educational poster. That was the challenge presented to me for this project. Through exploration in typography and image-manipulation, the final poster should be eye-catching and provocative from a distance, and hold up under close scrutiny. In addition, since this is an educational poster, a large amount of text was required to explain the concept of urban agriculture and why it might be adopted by the reader. This text had to work well in tandem with the flashier typography and imagery. To begin this process, I started with some sketches of possible ideas.

From there, I mocked up a first draft of one of the sketches. Many of the above concepts involved some drafting, photocollage or other image manipulation, so I set to work making the corn stalk/metropolis combination.

Once it was created, it felt too staid, too literal-minded, to really bring surprise and delight to the educational poster. I tore it down and started anew. I looked for inspiration at works by some of design's enfant terribles: Wolfgang Weingart, April Greiman, David Carson. For the next draft, obvious links to urban agriculture and conventional typography went out the window.

From there, it became a process of refinement, of scaling back eccentricities and of making the connection to city agriculture concrete. The original text became legible again, the purely textural schema re-incorporated illustrative elements. Over many micro-iterations, including color tweaks in response to test tweaks, I came to the final educational poster design below.