Unbound Musicality — Alisha Verma

Unbound Musicality

Poster Design

Spring 2025: Typography II

Objective:

To develop a dynamic, yet cohesive visual system that conveys distinct artistry of musicians Jjjjjerome Ellis, Patti Smith, and Charmaine Lee through a series of three posters advertising a fictional event.

Free-Play:

To develop a visual language for my posters, I experimented with typographic free-play.

To create a feeling of being “unbound,” I experimented with photographing the type through a drinking glass or plastic wrap, running them through a scanner, or using different blending modes in Photoshop to create layering and transparency effects.

Concept Sketches:

The most promising results from my free-play exploration were then distilled into several concept directions for the poster series.

Digital Iterations:

Combining analog and digital techniques to further flesh out my different concept directions.

Unbound Musicality Concept Explanation:

This concept is an exploration of the boundary-defying musicality of Patti Smith, Jjjjjerome Ellis, and Charmaine Lee. These three poets rebel against the traditions of poetry and music in order to create their own powerful modes of expression.

My approach for this concept centers on the interplay between abstract drawing and distorted type to convey the uniquely groundbreaking musicality of each artist. Abstract drawing created while listening to each artist’s music disrupts smaller text in the background that represents the societal boundaries each artist’s work rebels against.

Final Posters:

To represent Jjjjjerome Ellis’ disruption of ablest society, his poster revolves around themes of repetition that echo Ellis’ own stutter.

The characters of Ellis’ name are stretched out to signify the poet’s exploration of the intersection between stuttering and time. Markmaking variety in the abstract drawing also echoes the fusion of ambient and jazz sounds in Ellis’ music.

To echo Patti Smith’s rebellious spirit, her poster follows the theme of disruption that radiates throughout her poetry.

The central type subverts typical grid structures, instead varying in size and angle. Fiery red pencil strokes weave in and out of the type, echoing Smith’s unbound, energetic performance style.

To signify Charmaine Lee’s improvised contortion of the human language, her poster explores the theme of distortion.

The type that makes up Lee’s name is distorted to echo the variety of abstract and animal-like sounds she uses in her work. This diversity in sound is echoed in the variation in line weight within the abstract drawing.

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