The Music Business students of Dallas Baptist University are given the opportunity once a year to perform original music for their fellow non-musically-gifted DBU peers at the Music Business Showcase. As one of the graphic designers assigned to help advertise this event through the use of a poster, social media post, and chapel slide, I was given the opportunity to learn more about the world of music and grow in my abilities as a graphic designer.
Before starting my work on the poster, I needed to come up with several ideas in order to give myself a visual of what I would be creating. The process of creating these thumbnail sketches allowed me to look into and research musical terminology and where different notes were located on the staff and how they may be oriented. For example, any note that is above the third (middle) line, is flipped upside down, that way the ledger line does not stand taller than the staff.
As a child, I took piano lessons, meaning that once a week I would meet with my instructor and we would work through reading music and then turning that sheet music into played songs. Please do not misunderstand, I can not read sheet music anymore, even if it were to save my life, but I remembered when starting this assignment that music notes ranged anywhere from letter A through letter G.
I figured that given my intended audience were people with an interest in music, it would be clever to speak their language. I used an online image of a treble clef resting on a staff, and then placed two quarter notes, one that reads "d" and the other that reads "b." I followed the staff with an uppercase letter "U" to ultimately finish my hidden message of "DBU" to create my logo.
Using our DBU patriotic colors of red, white, and blue, I created two overlapping circles. After presenting this first draft, I was encouraged to try texturizing my poster rather than using the circles. After time spent playing with different textures, I found a paint-covered canvas to be the back of my poster, after dropping the opacity of course, as to not lose readability.
From left to right:
Poster Design // Social Media Post Design // Poster Mock-Up
