Salute Design Award: Poster Category - Honorable Mention 2025
Design a film festival poster that followed a randomly assigned title. There were body copy content restrictions, requirements for dates, headers, and the festival title had to be hand made. The most important requirement was that the poster had to be surrealist and include an “A-Ha” moment.
BRIEF/GOALS
The title I was given was “Wild Card.” In order to stand out I decided to divert from the playing card motif, which I felt was to obvious.
I developed a brand system for the film festival and gave the festival real world parameters i.e. turning the festival into a competition where films were randomly selected to be “picked” and then voted on by the audience.
I also designed a ticket that held a small figurine from the poster, which could be pulled out and “picked” and then placed into a receptacle for voting.
PROCESS
After generating the concept I experimented with different treatments of the people to create an erie feel, which included melting the plastic. Then I created a fake diorama to get the scale of the people correct so that I could photograph the background scene myself, in real life. Original iterations of the poster included physically lifting
the figures out off of the ground, but it was not conveying erie — and instead looked confusing. Then each element of lettering and imagery was hand-ripped and photoshopped in. The final comp. stoped there, but after criqtique I decided to put the entire scene into a vintage TV to create a stronger surrealism feeling.
ROLES
Type Design
Photoshop Execution
Studio Lighting
Photo Retouching
Image Production
A poster should be more than print material. A poster has a purpose, an audience, a need to pull people in. A poster that tells a story sticks in someone’s mind (even if they dont realize why it is stuck in their mind). Plain pretty colors are forgettable, thoughtful choices and thought povoking imagery is longer lasting.
WHY
