Don't Panic - Existing Posters

To start the research for the Don't Panic poster brief I looked at some of the past winning posters to see the kind of thing that other people have created which impressed enough to win.
Here are some of the examples that I liked the best.

Original by Jake Evans

This is actually one of the posters that i liked the least. The colours are really bright and quite hard to look at together which makes the image less appealing to me. I suppose the colours are supposed to be a representation of CMYK as a reference to printing process but that idea itself is not very 'original'. 

The illustration seems quite random which I guess relates to the title in a way, but it doesn't have any apparent relation to anything and looks just like a random sketch. 

Fresher Girl 2009 by Nathan Fox

I do really like this illustration and the mixture of techniques in the image. I actually have this poster on the wall of my bedroom. The colours are bright and contrasting but I think they compliment each other in the overall image. The content of the image is interesting and detailed and it creates an overall effect of one of those pictures where you can spot something else every time you look at it.

Home by Matt Macgregor Glen

I really like the idea behind this image and I think it has been implemented really well. The idea is to make the type into the style of an birds eye overhead floor plan of a building. This is the kind of plan that architects or interior designers might use to get an idea of exactly where everything is in the building including windows and doors etc. I think it has been done really well and creates an interesting cubic style font

Nature by Sam Ashton

This design is again really cubist styled which works well s a representation of rocky looking mountains. The simplicity of the outlines in contrasted by a relatively complex shading style which makes a really nice image overall. The choice of background colour makes the snowy peaks stand out against the rocks and the simple use of progressively less and less colour intensity in the higher rocks gives a sense of depth and scale to the whole image. 

Euthanasia by Traffic

I like the look of this piece of design but I don't really understand the context of it. The simple bold shapes work well and I like the fact that the male human figure is prominent. The figure is immediately recognisable as a male human figure even though it is a simple white silhouette and actually doesn't look much like the contours of a person at all. I can only guess at the context of the poster in saying that the pink orbs that seem to be penetrating the figures head are in some way a representation of the definition of euthanasia. This isn't immediately obvious and I would never be able to guess the title of the poster if I didn't already know it but in terms of aesthetics I do really like this poster.

There are 208 poster examples on the don't panic website and a new one is added every month.  

You can see that each poster is really different in different ways. The posters range between illustration and type and vary a lot on style and colour so really the only useful thing that i can gain from this research is that the final look of the poster seems to be the most important thing. There isn't really a lot of 'message' to try and communicate and realistically the posters function is to look good so that students will put the poster on their bedroom walls and inadvertently advertise Don't Panic.