Patriotic: The Play Poster

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Play Performance Poster Project

for Visual Translation, Spring 2016

Project Description

Read an article about human experience and/or human interaction in contemporary society. Using the article as inspiration, write a synopsis for a new play. The play's title should be the best emotive word that describes the mood, emotion, or personality of your story. Design a poster that promotes this new theater production. The poster should be so "attractive" to its audience that they want to keep it or display rather than discard.

You will be creating your own artwork for this project. The poster concepts are conceptually abstract so consider reference that is representational and/or symbolic.

For my project, I chose to use the series of Guardian articles about Edward Snowden and the NSA surveillance of US citizens. As required, I used a word play exercise to choose a word for my play's title. I chose words that focused on the emotions and experiences that I expect my audience to feel during the play, as well as how a reader of the articles would feel. After a series of word play exercises, I chose the word "patriotic." Following my word choice, I created pages of thumbnails trying to tie the word "patriotic" to Edward Snowden and my imaginary play. As I progressed, my professor and I agreed to follow two paths towards a poster. One path focused on the surveillance aspect of the story, which I created with a surveillance camera illustration. The second path focused on the classified nature of both the NSA and Snowden's activities, for that I chose to create a redacted text poster. You will find both completed posters below.

Sketches/Idea Generation