Project Specs
Create a poster (11”x17”) and a handbill (5.5”x8.5”) for The Beast of Blackthorn Manor, the Red Dot Players’ 2023 production.
Key words/concepts: girl in a red dress, necklace with a ruby, gothic humour tone, smoke, mist, moors, ominous/creepy trees or branches.
My Design Choises
I first started this project by looking at tons of stock images to see what was out there to work with and to generate some ideas. Initially I was drawn to mist, creepy trees, and gothic tones. There’s some readily available free images and types to work with for that. There were about three foggy forest images that stood out and caught my attention. The one I chose (as you see in the poster) had great depth to it, since there’s a clear direction the forest path is taking you even though the path itself is not obvious.
That by itself is kind of boring.
The two design pieces that bracket the title is what I am singularly most proud of for this poster, those black brackets are actually the base of these gothic candelabras I found in an image of a castle fireplace while browsing. There was no way I could incorporate the full original image into my design, but the candelabras really stood out to me and I knew I had to have something based on them.
The display font of the title was also something I browsed around for. It was one of the earlier types I found, put to the side, and then came back to. The font needed to be both appropriately toned and legible. When that was all finished, I felt that something was still missing. First I played around with more colour which eventually led me to a splash of colour with the claw marks which I felt added the tension that had had been missing.
Taylor Dew-Jones 