Last week, I noticed a debate happening on Facebook:
I weighed in on the discussion with my two cents about Posters, and then I emailed Adam, and asked him if he would write a blog post about it, and suggested he interview or collaborate with Ryan Mooney on it. Ryan had what I thought was a brilliant idea for RENT: he put a number on the bottom of the poster, and asked people to text it if they wanted more information. The number was for his own cel phone, and he had a message ready to copy and paste every time he got a request. Low cost, and effective.
Here’s an excerpt from Adam’s blog post:
Now, I’m a graphic designer by trade so when I speak to issues of visual communication, I speak from experience. And I know that while posters need visual impact to succeed, a strong visual without content and meaning behind it is an empty vessel. The primary meaning of even the most beautiful, eye-catching poster is to communicate a message. And while this may be a matter of taste, I tend to find the more abstract and obscure approaches less preferable to one that tangibly represents the themes and reaches out to try and draw in the viewer.
I thought that this whole approach might possibly be due to some kind of resistance to the perceived reductivism of the all-too-familiar movie tagline, perhaps maybe even an aversion to what’s perceived as a populist or even crass approach better suited to a mass-market medium than the (in theory) more rarified world of live performance.
Read the entire post here.
Epilogue: I found out after that the poster Adam was talking about was for a show I am doing publicty for: Scorched. The producers are reprinting the posters with more details, and have offered Adam tickets to opening night, which he accepted.
