Project 2: Visual Hierarchy

11 min readOct 27, 2021

C Mini 2 — Fall 2021

Time Frame: 2 1/2 Weeks

PROJECT CONTENT: Row House Cinema 2021 Drive In

Research

The first step of this project or any project for that matter, is to do research on the audience, context and content of the work or the piece that I will be presenting.

Context, Content and Audience

The first part of my research would be to identify the audience that would be attending this event and hence would also be the kind of readers I would like my poster to finally appeal to.

Strip District and the neighbourhood that this pop-up district is placed in suggests that the audience would generally be Western Pennsylvanians, people from Pittsburgh and also since this neighbourhood is usually packed with a bustling crowd of tourists and young adults on the weekends this series of events could also have tourists or people visiting that neighbourhood only for that weekend. This would make sense since Row House Theatre have partnered with the Terminal who intend to make Strip District a more appealing place.

The obvious age range for the audience should be one which would be able to own a driver’s license. This could mean that one could possibly bring their family with younger ones with them, however the fact that most of the movies are thrillers and are scary and are also older movies mostly released in between the 1960s-1980s suggests that this event tends to attract an older audience. One other fact that hints to the age range is the fact that the weekly movies are all sponsored by brewing companies also suggests that the targeted audience would be 21 and over.

Furthermore the movies that are presented are very curated and related to a theme rather than playing the newer and popping movies. This suggests that the people that go and watch movies here are people who are proper film enthusiasts.

I have already established the location and its impact on the crowd. However, the one other thing that I have learned is that the Row House Cinema is actually a proper cinema in Lawrenceville, Pittsburgh. It is a small independent cinema. The theatre is known for its festivals, events, and its connected taproom and bottle shop “Bierport.” All of this suggests that the audience would be over 21 especially. They have a proper film club that have around 400 members which suggests that their audience are people who regularly visit the same place every weekend.

Experimenting with Hierarchy

Notes from Vicki’s Presentation:

Hierarchy has five main principles:

Contrasts: shifts in contrast captures attention; this includes colour, text size etc.
Proximity: this means grouping elements of design. Relating elements should be grouped.
Alignment: it maintains order between elements.
Scale: size indicates importance. Viewer prompted to look at specific elements
Colour: pops of colour attracts viewer

Exercises

Experiment 1: Experimenting with 2 stroke weights

Exercise 1: Experimenting with Stroke Weights

Experiment 2: Experimenting with Line Spacing

Experiment 3: Experimenting with single horizontal shifts

Experiment 4: Experimenting with double horizontal shifts

Experiment 5: Experimenting with Stroke weight and Line Spacing

Experiment 6: Experimenting with StrokeWeight and Horizontal Shifts

REFLECTION & MAIN TAKEAWAYS

The constrains in this exercise helped me think about each of the elements (stroke weight, line space and horizontal shifts) very intensively. It was at times frustrating to tackle the challenges of hierarchy by just controlling one variable. The initial reflection on what the hierarchy was in terms of the lines was very helpful to tackle the exercises.

Some main pointers from the exercises were:

In terms of stroke-weight I really enjoyed the contrast in between the light version and the medium version.
Personally, I though the Bold version was too much and was asking for too much attention when put by side another stroke weight
I also found out that (it was intuitive) having the two weights that are closer to each other had very little contrast and was really hard to see the hierarchy
Linespacing helped with grouping of the elements and played with proximity.
Grouping by weekends was very successful according to me.
Grouping the “Row house Cinema” and the “Pop-up drive-in theatre returns to the Strip District!” was also required because the latter line is divided into lines and if it is ungrouped with Row House Cinema then it shares the value of a weekend of movies.
When things in groups are aligned together it plays better in terms of visually differentiating them.
Horizontal shifting linearly was helpful. 0 Tab spaces for the The first three lines. 1 tab space for sponsor breweries. 2 tab spaces for the two weekend movies
Increasing the tab spaces for the movies and grouping them was better
Increasing it too much and making it look like it is in a different column made it unsuccessful
Coupling the stroke weight and linespacing made things a little easier. Taking grouping from the earlier exercises and using the light and medium stroke weights and grouping the weekends was very successful.

Exploration with Scale

After these initial experimentation, we dove a little deeper into how Scale can help determine visual hierarchy along with Alignment and placements. We initially played with paper and placement of the text on it.

I experimented with several possibilities, however here are a few that I believe that worked the best.

Initially my explorations were only based on strictly 90 degree alignments. I explored with rotating the text but even then, it was still within right angles. Vicki gave us the idea of exploring with more dynamic angles and I liked that idea. So I did some experimenting with that.

Notes and Take Aways:

I noticed the rigid grid column structure that I was initially following. Aligning to the left and within a two column structure was very helpful in terms of grouping
For some reason I believe that have the line “Pop-up drive-in theatre returns to the strip district” at the largest scale was the most helpful. I think this is because the poster is about advertising this specific set of events. Furthermore, the word “Pop-up” seems to be one of the most important aspect of this event. Having that quite literally pop-up to the viewers made sense with the bigger and bolder version.
Adding a little rotation helped add movement and energy to mood that the information was creating.
I tried to imitate the idea of movement and that experience of a drive-in experience — I tried to imitate the structure of the wheel
My first iteration of the idea was quire rigid in terms of the grid structure and the indentations even though it has the content placed in a rotating ‘wheel’ format.
Hence, I changed the indentation of the line “Pop-up drive-in theatre returns to the strip district” to move a little bit more into the page.
To further the idea of a pop-up experience, I broke that phrase up and made every words placement more random and dynamic.

Moving digital

From those initial paper explorations, I moved into placing those ideas on the screen. I went to explore more off of the ones that I thought were the most successful from my paper experimentation. These are the few of the most successful ones.

Exploring with Colour

Before digitally adding colours, I spent time physically creating colour swatches to look at how colour combinations would look on paper. I created thumbnail swatches as you can see below.

Through this exercise I realised that I really was drawn towards darker pallets with pops of bright colours. I think that combination of darker colours with with shades of orange would sit well with the theme of halloween and I could do a lot to add the idea of ‘weirdness’ and ‘uniqueness’ with the colour palettes.

Adding colour to Designs

Using Adobe Capture, I recreated those swatches on the screen. I played around with the colours. Sometimes I add brightness and sometimes I play with opacity and shapes.

I really enjoy the versions with the shape and the scale exercises integrated. I think they work really well together. Especially the ones with the dynamically placed text.

This idea of mine was well appreciated in class. My peers and professors thought that colour did help separate my information but the use of the orange for both, the main large describing text and the event details meant that there was a lot of fighting for attention. The dynamism of the text was really appreciated by my peers and I do intend to take that forward in my poster making process. It brings out the ‘weird’ adjective that we were talking about in class. Further it helps’s bring out the idea of a ‘pop-up’ experience. Keeping the Row House stagnant helped communicate it as something permanent.

Images

I think this is really tricky for me. I think that I am thinking too much on how the final project will turn out to be rather than trying stuff out. While I was searching for images, I was thinking about the mood and atmosphere that I wanted my poster to put forward. I wanted to look at images that were outdoorsy, with night-time vibes, halloween themed, car based etc.

Here are some images that I found.

Adding Images to the Design

As you can see, I spent a lot of time exploring with different images and doing different things with each of them. After spending time with each of the images, I really enjoyed the fact that I interact with my image. It makes the image more purposeful.

One thing that I lose out with these images is the dynamic placing of the text. I feel like my images adhere to the halloween and the retro theme that I was going for. Vicki thought that the car is very vintage and it does not necessarily communicate the time frame that I am going for.

One thing that was not working with the text was the staggering I tried across the page. That gave an hierarchy even within the events which was not my intention. I should not use that. I would like to explore the dynamic text on the image iterations that I like and possibly explore with images that can accommodate that.

Choosing and reiterating posters

These were a few more iterations that I came up with. I think that the steering wheel idea is something that I like better. It helps me use the dynamism of the text that I wanted better. I ran some photoshop on it to bring in the spooky effect. I had to think about bringing in my most successful scale exercises into the image.

Having the Row House as the only all capital wording and following the vertical really helped my case on bringing it emphasis and giving it the permanence that it requires. However, I feel like currently its size is very big and the dynamic text and the Row House are fighting for attention. I want to try and make it smaller and the dynamic text bigger. I would have to change the way I placed the image and also probably go back to the original non-grainy version.