Dear Daughter Inspiration
On April 15 Mur Lafferty wrote a blog post on her site titled Dear Daughter…(http://www.murverse.com/2012/04/15/dear-daughter/) and within hours of publishing it she received over one hundred comments. The post is in response to a TED talk titled A Call To Men. It’s incredibly well written and serious but takes the time to include small elements of humor as well. She outlines the subtle and not so subtle ways in witch women are treated differently in order to explain it to a young girl. Here at the office we were inspired to make a poster for this influential blog post. There is a preview of the final image below and the full-size image is at the bottom of this post.
When I started this project I knew it was going to be a full typographic poster that was just jam packed with text from the blog. It began at the humble poster size of 11″x17″ but as I kept adding more text it continued to grow taller and taller until the final size was 11″x60″. The most difficult part was including every single word from the post but maintaining a sense of flow and rhythm to the sentences.
With a big poster like this you read it differently than when you read the text in the original article. Words are emphasized differently, your eye is drawn around in more of a non-linear fashion, and by breaking up the sentence structure differently you can sometimes glean different meanings from them. I had to create a sense of flow throughout the poster so that the reader doesn’t get lost and confused about what part to read next. I overcame these obstacles by breaking the blog post in to manageable chunks. I would read a section and pick a few key words or phrases that I would want to highlight and then try and work out a solution to wrapping the other text around it. I would almost always try and make sure that each chunk filled the poster from left to right so I would have a clear place to start the next one. Before I began on the next one I would take a look at the overall image and make sure that it flowed and that you could get a gist of the article by glancing at the key words and phrases. I wanted it to look interesting at a glance and also give some insight into what the overall piece is about. It was an incredibly fun project to work on and I hope I get the chance to do more like it. Check out the final version below, post a comment and let me know what you think, and contact us if you would like a full-size 5′ print for $49.00.
