Japan Poster ProgressionBy Craig Geffre

Goals: Develop interest in study abroad programs in Japan; provide basic information to convey that it’s possible to make study abroad work; ultimately get more applicants and send more students abroad

Audience: Students at Oregon State University as well as students at partner campuses around the state.

Message: There are several options in Japan available to accommodate different academic schedules and coursework will count toward graduation.

Following this first design, which is pretty uninteresting, I went with a full-screen photo of Shibuya in downtown Tokyo and added black boxes to put my text in. It’s more exciting than the last iteration, but without a lot holding it together yet. The heading was changed to be more interesting.

Photo credit: “scramble” by David Offf (https://www.flickr.com/photos/67162482@N07/)

Looking to jazz things up, we’ve got some color and text experimentation happening in the next slide. The heading has been moved up off the black background to make it stand off the page. The heading and subheading are more aligned with each other.

The next iteration works more with color. The orange is a compliment of the sky in the background, and the textboxes are of the same hue as the sky except heavily shaded. Additional subheads were added in orange to break things up more and add repetition, and bullets were added to make things a little easier to read.

The next one uses a new photograph, with a temple in the foreground and Mt. Fuji in the distance. I grabbed a red hue from the pagoda and added a lot of tint to get the title color, used a complementary color for the subheadings, and make the text to cover the full screen. The image brightness and saturation of the photo were adjusted to make the text stand out and initial capitals in the heading and subheads are exaggerated.

Photo credit: “Mt. Fuji” by Anna & Michal (https://www.flickr.com/photos/michalo/)

In the final design, I’ve decreased the size of the subheadings and body text so that I can display more of the underlying picture. This version highlights the Pagoda and Mt. Fuji in the background. Some of the body text has also been changed up a little.