jilli design 
Typography Poster Design
project introduction
For this project, we were assigned to create a poster about a song and its conceptual meaning. The song I was assigned was Thank U, Next by Ariana Grande. The concept I wanted to convey was a scrapbook. This song is all about reflecting on her past relationships and what she has gained from them. Towards the end of the song, she is also self-accepting and realizes she can be on her own. I chose to use a scrapbook concept because the music video is about looking back on the past, and we do this with scrapbooks. Looking back on old photos and memories, similar to how she does in the song, with her relationships. Parts of the music video are also inspired by the movie “Mean Girls,” which is where I got the idea to make the front of the poster look like the infamous burn book. You can see in my early sketches how I play around with the orientation as well as the placement of elements on the poster.
ideation and process
The images below show some of my initial sketches as I first began to think about the layout and orientation of my poster. I always knew I wanted it to be a vertical poster because it made the most sense for my song title and text. My biggest challenge in this stage was figuring out where text should go, as well as playing around with hierarchy.
These sketches show my thoughts as I begin to plan the layout for the backside of my poster. I began to think about it using a grid system, which allowed me to begin to organize content more easily. I began to finalize my hierarchy here and started to think about how this hierarchy would take form as I began to place all of the elements onto the poster itself.
Details and Breakdown
Some requirements for this project were that we could only use text to create our concept, we had to include a timeline, and sections of text about the artist as well as about the song. The only image we were allowed to use was an image of the artist or album cover. Only being able to use text came as a challenge to me because I wanted to incorporate the imagery of the iconic lip marks throughout the design. After consulting with my instructor, I came up with the idea to make the lips out of lyrics from the song itself. This was the most time-consuming part of the project, but it was well worth it for the result. The typeface I chose was selected because it gives the impression of ransom note or scrapbook letters.
For the back of the poster, I designed it to appear as a page inside the scrapbook with a jumbled and torn appearance. I also repeated the word “next” down the page because the artist does this throughout the song. I incorporated the lips from the front onto the back as markers for the timeline dates. To continue on the torn scrapbook theme, I oriented the text of the paragraphs as if they were being ripped apart, which elevates the concept.
final product
reflections and learnings
For this project, we were also required to print our final design. It was a long troubleshooting and learning process. Through the journey of this project, I learned critical printing and pre-press techniques in order to get my projects to print correctly and precisely.