Stairway wit senior fine art & design exhibition

Mercer University and Mceachern art center

Brief:

Design an 11x17 poster for Mercer University’s Senior Fine Art and Design Exhibition at the McEachern Art Center in downtown Macon. This poster will be hung around Mercer’s campus and locally to encourage and inform people to attend the opening reception or visit the gallery during the regular hours.

Approach:

The design couldn't mimic any artists’ or designers’ work because all twelve seniors had a variety of styles. The design was inspired by the name of the show, L'esprit de l'escalier, loosely translated as stairway wit. It is from Diderot’s story of a perfect response coming just after its moment in a conversation, about leaving a discussion and only afterward realizing the right thing to have said. As students, we were encouraged to experiment and explore failure in studio projects throughout our time at Mercer. We didn’t always know what to do in the studio or even enjoy the final product. Thus, the crumpled paper in this design was meant to expresses that it had been discarded somewhere, then found after to be more appreciated.

Result:

After much discussion with faculty and students, we agreed upon this design, I have attached other final versions below. We then designed the vinyl for the exterior windows based on the poster. The poster was highly effective, as we had one of the busiest opening receptions I had been to in my time at Mercer University.