Poster
Moving forward with my digital and typographical outcomes, I was next needing to expand my outcomes into the deliverables format that I am required to submit at the end of the project. After inital thoughts on what the visual language might look like within the logo marque, I decided to try and create some digital mockups of potential poster layouts. For my poster I need to be able to attract audeinces from a far distance away, while still keeping them interested while they approach closer, I personally find it exteremly easy to miss the perfect mark when creating a poster. With previous experimentations I used a large amount of red and black within my colour scheme,as much of my inspirational research also contained this colour scheme, it seems advantageous to carry this theme onwards moving fowards.
After my research it became clear to me that the true facts of Chernobyl are much uglier than the facts that were told at the time at the disaster. Due to the nature of the nation in which the diaster occured as well as their effort to prevent a panic situation from arrising with the Soviet Union. However due to the pure scale of the diaster, the nuclear radiation was detected in countries as far away as Sweden merely hours after the incident occured. This is also the most dangerous time for radioactivity. Those unstable elements that producde the greatest amount of radiation also last the shortest amount of time. However the short lived fuel used within the Chernobyl reactor four was also only used by the soviet union, so once the small levels of radioactivity were detected within Sweden, it was very easy to tell that the soviet union was the origin of the disaster.
After this research I decided to attempt to use imagery and visual metaphor for this situation. Throughout the disaster there were many other examples of the Russians attempting to play down the severity of the disaster e.g. when the workers required robots to clean the roof of reactor no.4. The soviet government gave other countries a much lower number of radiation that was actually detected. Due to this, the other countries donated robots that were not capable of withstanding the radiation, leading to men having to clear the roofs manually, nicknamed “bio-robots”.
The image I decided to take forward was this image of “in Russian, everything is neat and refined” however in other languages it is a total disaster. I decided to attempt to translate this throughout all of my text in my brand. Seen in this particular poster I have translated that message within the text by having the Russian headings text be perfectly set kerning, leading and all other typographic systems, however this text is hidden behind the slightly larger English heading where the kerning is changed often between letterforms, some of the letterforms are turned italic whereas some are not, as well as some tails on letterforms appearing to melt down the page.
Overall, by applying this effect the English writing becomes slightly unsettlingly to look at, translating the ugly truths of the events of Chernobyl that have been proven to be true. As this exhibition is taking place in the present tense and the true facts have been revealed I decided to have the neat and perfectly formed Russian letterforms placed in the background, so that the English letterforms are glaring at the viewers more significantly.
Aidan's Graphics Blog 