Each year, RIT is home to the campus wide fair known as Imagine RIT. All across the campus students show off their creativity and imagination through the projects they have been working on all semester. To advertise the event, RIT holds a poster contest for any student to submit to. This year my poster won second place. My friend and co-masochist, Amanda Ho won first place with her hand illustrated poster. Over the course of two weeks, we went from ideation to final submission.
Initial Concept
With every project I do, I try my best to experiment with my process. For this poster, I focused on my brainstorming process. I had recently finished Refactoring Your Weware by John Cena. There was a partion of the book that talked about the impact of multisensory input on creativity. So I gave it a shot. I put on my headphones, spread a collection of design books on my bed, and began dancing in my underpants. After an hour of word associations, I had amassed a wall of sticky notes describing what I felt to be the ethos of Imagine RIT.
Initial brainstorming.
From there, I collected my favorite ideas and began sketching. At the same time, I was also gathering reference and inspiration. I decided to forgoe a Pinterest board for this project and opted to use PureRef instead.
First round of sketches.
By the end of the first week, I had decided on the concept for my poster. I was gravitating towards this idea of a magnet which formed into an hourglass. Instead of sand, it would hold various objects that represent RIT. The first week was almost over and I began modeling and rendering assets for the poster.
Wednesday afternoon of the second week, we had our final check-in before submitting our posters on Friday. I knew my poster needed work but I was not expecting to throw away my idea two days before the deadline. However, after looking over the feedback from my professor and class, I knew it was not worth pushing my current idea. I was trying too hard to capture too many ideas. What I needed was to simplify my concept.
That evening, I took a short nap in which I had a dream about wooden letter blocks stacking on eachother. It wasn't something that had come up in my brainstorming, but it made sense. It captured the child-like creativity abounding at RIT. In addition, I could add little illustrations to each block for a second layer of detail. At around the same time, I also had another idea for a bird-cage lightbulb.
Around 8:00 PM, I began modeling and texturing in Cinema 4D. I went straight through until the next morning playing around with my two concepts. By 10:00 AM on Thursday, I had two posters I was quite satisifed with.
First iteration of posters after changing ideas.