New Music Market - Visual Identity and Poster Development

I created a poster for the promoting of NMM in general; I like the finished outcome, the bottom blue section is reminiscent of the dual sides you often see in supermarket advertisements, the typography with the fluctuating letterforms matches the logo/brand identity well and along with the gradient waves which visually represent sound/music, there is a fair amount of visual intrigue created. 

In order to create a set of posters with a coherent visual identity linking to NMM, I need to establish a baseline visual device or layout which can be used in all of the posters. 

Contemporary Graphic designer Kunel Gaur was an interesting point of research. Gaur creates digital mockups of packaging design, however throughout every single package/product, there is the same monochromatic minimal visual identity. All the designs are very subdued and rational; none of the type is decorative, simply appearing in Helvetica, and all the illustrations are very simple and un-stylised, almost pictographic. The design reminds me of the 60’s Sainsbury’s packing I saw at the ‘Cornflakes to Cola’ exhibition at the Design Museum, however the Sainsbury’s packaging differs from product to product a bit more; its 60’s m modernist design aesthetic is very present throughout all the designs, with sans serif typography laid out harmoniously, and basic geometric shapes such as circles used frequently, however aspects like colour distinguish the products here in comparison to Kunel Gaur’s work. 

Ultimately, even though I’ve already completed my packaging design, which differs greatly between each label, these examples of research are useful to study when trying to discern and conceive a brand uniformity throughout my posters. I think the Sainsburys packaging branding is a lot more successful, because its able to retain this brand identity, while still differing between products, which creates a range of colours and layouts which is a lot more engaging then the monochromatic very uniform work of Kunel Gaur.

Thinking about a layout for my posters, I thought back to the research I did on supermarket billboards and posters and there are a few visual devices which often appear on supermarket posters; often they’re split in half with a spot colour filling one half, this half will have a line of copy or the product name on, whilst the other white half will have a picture of the product on. They also often have circles on the product which have the name and/or the price. I created some mockup posters using this layout, however I changed the type of the tagline I came up with (in reference/parody of supermarket taglines) ‘a new way to buy music’ to match the type of the corresponding label design. I then added colours from the label designs which worked really well in my opinion, the uniform layout throughout still gives a sense of brand identity, but the type and colour alternating gives each poster their own style. I also created my general NMM poster, which I think could have a photo of all 3 of the products on. 

Thinking forward to practical considerations, wondering what the posters would look like pasted up together, I alternated the white/coloured halves on two of the posters to see if it would be more interesting and engaging as a set, But ultimately I think they worked batter with all the same layout as the alternating halves caused a bit more disarray visually. I also tried making the app store logo and price bubble blue to match the NMM Branding but the colours didn’t sit very harmoniously because of the variation. I made the NMM logo a lot larger in order to solidify the brand.