Poem Broadside
Design Brief
For this project, the SDSU Graphic Design department teamed up with the English and Comparative Literature Department to create poem broadsides. Each student chose a poem from the Poetry International website and was challenged to create a conceptual design based off the meaning of the poem. After completing the process, all students showcased their designs to a panel of representatives from the English department.
Moodboard
Poem
Hungry Ghosts
By: Tony Barnstone
Old friend, you write, Why write? It’s all trash,
nothing to say. Maybe you’re right. Why keep writing
with this tool to inscribe time, line by line, measuring
what is lost as it leaves? No one reads this stuff.
If only the words were a body I could inhabit
and you could feel me through this membrane,
like skins touching. I remember one day telling you
I felt I was just starting to wake from the long dumb
sleep of childhood, but was lost in the dark rush
of the senses, and I imagined my spirit
as blind, reaching through flesh and tickertape
consciousness, a hand trying to grasp itself.
I would like to believe in souls reaching through
the flesh of understanding, hungry to be seen
and detecting each other through defective means.
I would like to believe this life is a sleep we’ll wake from,
that some conductor drives our spirits through
this tunnel and for a reason. But I find myself talking
in darkness, huddled around the narrow flame
of my own being, the way a child I knew, yes, me,
would walk home from the bus stop chanting nonsense
because when he fell silent the empty dark
closed in and made him know how blind he was,
how ravenous for dinner, lights, and mother.
And he would make the television blaze and shout
just to stop that dead black eye from staring.
And in bed, he’d pull the covers over his head
when his mother said, Lights out, and pray for sleep.
Challenge
I chose a poem that was significantly long because I thought it would give me more ideas and imagery to work with but when trying to create a dynamic composition I found it difficult to work with big blocks of body text. I wanted the overall design to be balanced while still maintaining negative space. Lastly, the size constraint was 13”x19” and I had to ensure that the body text was legible while not being overbearing to the piece.
Solution
When analyzing this poem, I felt a sense of loneliness and a yearning for help. I felt as though the author wanted to portray someone who is in a dark place, but who is also still searching for that glimmer of hope. The main image I used was a man standing in a dark tunnel walking towards a light to reflect the dark and ominous emotions that were present in the poem. I also wanted to give meaning to the title by creating a ghost like feeling with the typography.
Typography
I used Bembo for the word ‘Ghosts’ because I wanted to incorporate an Old Style serif font. Bembo captures the essence of old horror movie poster titles and is even used in the poster for the 2013 adaptation of Stephen King’s Carrie. I then paired it with Frutiger, a humanist sans-serif, for the body text because I wanted the words to be clear and legible from a distance, since this is a poster.