ITP/IMA Winter Show Poster
Winter 2025
These posters were made for NYU's ITP/IMA Winter Show which welcomes hundreds of visitors every year!
Skills: 3D Modeling, Graphic Design Tools Used: Blender Modeling, Adobe Illustrator
Overview
An information poster for my department's winter showcase! This was an open design challenge with the prompt "For this challenge, we are inspired by topics like physicality, connectedness, shared space, and celebration. We're looking for a strong conceptual design that communicates the ITP/IMA ethos. We would like to see the more humanistic side of our community and fewer wire, breadboards, and LEDs." This poster was made in multiple formats for electronic and physical use.
Final Product
Ideation
I love my community at IMA, I love seeing everyone's projects when I walk into the space, the way you can ask anyone about their special interests. The design challenge really stuck with me, I wanted to capture the bustling environment of ITP/IMA in my poster. So I decided to model the space when you first walk through our doors.
A major inspiration that I had was isometric event posters. The type where are there wacky shenagains going on in a abstract space. I felt that it communicated the energy at our department well. In the end this is the concept that I went with.
Process
The first part of this process was modeling all the different part of the poster in 3D. Since my idea was to use an isometric view, I thought it would be easier to use 3D as it would be more accurate and I could move around the elements for the different versions.
The modeling style is meant to be light and playful so I went with a more cartoonish look for the characters and went with a simple but punchy color scheme. In the past I have always been scared to colors things a color that isn't the color they are supposed to be, but I have been working on improving this and pushing out of my comfort zone.
Arranging the furniture for the scene was simple, but it was the characters that were hard to place. I had to think about where to place the text that was required for the poster, and wow, there was more text than I first thought. For the text, I placed them into different hierarchies: the title, catchphrase, descriptions, and then information. Since the graphic I made was going to take up the whole poster size, I thought it would be neat to have the text integrate into the environment. I tried many variations until I could fit all of the text in a format that I was satisfied with.
Creating the graphic in 3D was the right call in the end, between tweaking the character's positions for the text and the many different formats I needed to provide, I was really moving those characters like they were action figures. The main jump for the formats was from the original vertical format I needed to provide and the following landscape versions. Because the view was much wider, I rearranged both the text and the model pretty drastically.
Bonus!
Here are some pictures of the poster at the event!
