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Drop The Shadow

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This was #3 of three posters I produced for a recent exhibition I was involved in called "DROPSHADOW: An Exploration of Design Taboo"

Here be the tumblr: dropshadow2011.tumblr.com/


Dropshadow refers specifically to the somewhat automated digital tool/effect, which has a traditionally bad reputation amongst the design community. Works featuring the effect often overuse it, or rely entirely upon it to create depth, and it more often than not comes off looking really tacky and fake. We were taught to pretty much never use it.

With this show, we wanted to showcase the potential positives of the Dropshadow effect, the argument being that when used creatively, or in the right context, it can be an effective aesthetic element.


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Illustrative type - my other lover. So this was an experiment and a half, haha. Somewhere along the line I went from being really legible to....not, lol. Pushing the letters into increasingly abstract territory, which is always fun. It became more of a unified composition, but I still put little hints in that it was type - including the obvious 'S', and the white lines that highlighted the letterforms.

More cryptically, I joined all the letters of each word so that you could follow them in sequence.

It's still pretty hard to read (easy for some I found, but they're used to seeing this kind of stuff), and I think it involves the viewer staying with the work for a while to work it out. If they want to. But otherwise, it just functions as an illustration, that still works conceptually. I noticed some of the shapes resembled monocles, and so threw a couple of top hats in for good measure haha. I wanted this one to be playful, and have some personality, after the other two posters which were pretty straightforward.

"Drop the shadow" is a play on words; a reference to the two opposing reactions that the dropshadow effect can elicit. As students we were encouraged to indiscriminately "drop" any use of dropshadow from our designs if we'd applied it, and it is still a cringe-worthy effect at times. On the other hand, this poster encourages you to just go ahead and drop the shadow anyway, lol. If you know what you're doing.

Anyway that's more than enough talking! Hope you enjoy :D

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© 2011 - 2024 Simanion
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TinyWild's avatar

Featured in my journal! :aww:

 

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