We wanted to give you a peak at a little job that rushed through the studio over the past two days. This project was both consuming and rewarding to work upon (the best kind). The 3rd International Urban Design Conference Designs On Our Future, is being held at the National Convention Centre, Canberra from the 30th August to 1st September. The conference will examine how our new cities are conceived and our existing ones are adapted, re-designed and managed.
As part of the conference, there is a poster exhibition and our client, Hames Sharley, is exhibiting 2 posters to compliment their discussion papers that are also being presented.
We received a very open brief for the project, complimented by a very tight deadline. We were requested to not take a typical approach of creating a poster using the clients relevant project imagery, but to create our own creative response after reading and absorbing the abstracts of each discussion paper.
After having the weekend to read, sketch, think and generally fiddle around with ideas, come Monday morning our creative brief was defined; Develop a core concept that could be threaded through both posters and because of the large scale of the posters, the concept should have an intelligent and impactful visual driver behind it that would draw in the reader from a distance and then reward them with the imagery itself being the core of the message.
Our solution was to create a a visual concept that had easily recognisable transport-related pictographs as the primary driver. We wanted to create easily identifiable symbols with a twist. The cyclist poster utilises the cycling pictograph with the rider shape created by a pattern of question marks responding to the topic of the poster. The CBD poster utilises transport pictographs to spell the word C-B-D, responding to the theme of Transport Oriented Development (TOD), as CDB’s contain all of these transport vehicles.
Impactful, intelligent and memorable. The posters were a standout success at the conference and were a lot of fun to work on to boot.