Bauhaus/Constructivist Poster

With this poster, I am projecting the message that the student’s fight against the increase of tuition fees in Quebec have come to a positive ending. The text at the top of the poster says: “Ensemble, nous avons bloqué la hausse”, literally meaning “Together, we have blocked the increase” showing that as students, they reached their goal and maintained the initial cost for education. Because it is a poster made in the context of education, it mainly targets students and therefore generally a younger audience that took part in the protests and overall movement. In regards to where it could be seen, as the previous and actual posters regarding this theme, they would be placed anywhere near schools or government buildings.

To create this poster, I have used two of my personal photographs. As a base, I took the one of the flower, rotated it, and turned into black and white to reflect on the photos used in Constructivist posters. Afterwards, using my inspiration of Lyonel Feininger, I took a fragment from the portrait photo (the smile) and applied it to the first. The application refers to Gustav Klutsis’s photomontage idea, as I pasted the smile into the flower’s contour to create somewhat of a collage. 

Moreover, to incorporate a Bauhaus feel to the poster, I used their common colors of red and grayscale tones as well as one of their basic shapes – the rectangle. These were made with the selection tool in Photoshop. Also touching on the Bauhaus style, the text made in Illustrator has the flipped aspect, to make the text element not obviously legible.

From a symbolic approach, the poster is made to mark the end of the protests. Therefore, the flower is placed there as a sign of peace, whereas the smile is a symbol of happiness due to the fact that students have come to a positive result.   

The inital sketch for the design idea: