Altered Earth
Typographic poster series exploring a unified visual system that balances cohesion with individuality to promote an event.
Poster Series - Typography II - Spring 2025
This typographic poster series focuses on the challenge of creating a cohesive visual design system that can unify multiple components while still honoring their differences. The assignment was to design a poster series that effectively communicated meaning by combining type and imagery that engaged and persuaded viewers to attend an event.
The prompt, Altered Earth: Poetic Perspectives on Planetary Shifts, served as a starting point for my research. From there, I explored the three poets whose work the posters would represent. By studying their voices, styles, contributions, and more I was able to form a foundation for this visual system.
Research
Orchid Tierney has a experimental writing style that is reflective and digressive. Her work navigates environmental struggles and is deeply rooted in material realities. She explores themes of ecology, decay, and waste management.
Hussain Ahmed’s poetry is expressive and deeply musical, honoring memory and grief. In his work, he finds a way to reimagine language to hold the weight of grief and loss. Furthermore, it often grapples with times of war, displacement, and spiritual resilience.
Heid E Erdrich’s poetry is lyrical and often blends storytelling with vivid imagery. Her work explores themes of indigenous identity, ancestry, Obijwe heritage, and cultural resilience. Through her writing, she weaves together personal, historical, and spiritual dimensions into a powerful and poetic voice.
Building from this research, I explored multiple concept directions through sketching. These early sketches allowed me to translate the poets’ themes and voices into visual form, testing different ways typography, imagery, and composition could communicate their work. This stage provided a foundation for refining the most effective design approach.
Sketches
The next step of this process was to experiment with typography—both through physical manipulation and digital exploration. This allowed for deeper development of the concepts, testing how type could physically embody the themes and voices drawn from the poetry.
Exploration
In this phase, I selected one poet to focus on and developed my concepts further on screen. I started with free-play image making to create an initial visual that was then brought into the computer to manipulate and refine. This process allowed for deeper exploration of how digital tools could expand and transform the original concept.
Digital Ideations
After receiving feedback, I refined my work based on those critiques. From there, I explored a single concept direction and applied it across all three poets, creating continuity while still highlighting each poet’s unique voice.
Refined Iterations
Final Series
