Designing a Concert Flyer

A few months ago, I designed this poster in Adobe Illustrator for a Full Sail assignment.  The assignment was, in a nutshell, to turn an assigned, roughly-sketched-on-paper (or on-napkin) concept from a fictional client into a fully-designed, digital concert poster.  The project I chose was a poster for violinist "Ira Kozlov" from Ukraine.  This Ira Kozlov wanted the poster for his concert, which he allegedly scribbled out on paper for me, to evoke the style of Russian constructivism.  So, I did some research on this style.

Examples of Russian constructivism from Google Images







There were a few things I noticed throughout all the pictures I saw.

1) The posters were all very simplistic, using lots of geometric shapes and silhouettes.

2) Their messages were clear, bold, in-your-face militant, and easy to understand in a glance.

3) There was a pretty consistent color scheme of black, red, white, and yellow.

4) The posters generally followed a minimalist design, with an effective usage of blank space.

I kept these styles at the forefront of my mind as I turned Kozlov's poster concept into a clean, minimalist, bold design.  Choosing the violinist silhouette, conductor's hand, Kozlov's signature, and text at the top were all "Kozlov's" ideas.  But there were several decisions I made along the way to make this design work in the way I thought it should.

Wireframe view in Illustrator and normal view

First, I chose to make the background red, both to relate it to the Russian constructivist style, and to allow the black silhouettes to stand out.

Second, I decided to use yellow to draw the viewer's eye to what was important, and to allow those elements to pop off the page.  Ira Kozlov's name was most important, and also the silhouette of him playing violin was one of the focuses of the graphic. (You may notice, even the angles of the shadow, the conductor's hand, and the slanted text boxes draw the viewer's eye toward the violinist.)

Third, (speaking of the text), I chose to slant all the text to help give the flyer a sense of movement and interest, a technique I observed a lot in examples of Russian constructivism.

Fourth, I placed the info in black rectangles (again, constructivist style, and also very minimalist and modern), using white text against black to make that text pop - but still not popping as much as the yellow text, which is where the viewer's eyes would travel first.

What other design techniques do you see used in this flyer?  If you are a designer, is there anything you would have done differently, had you been the one in my place?  Leave your comments below!