WIP Chess Poster Design Process

I will explore the design process for the first poster (above) I designed for the chess club. The club runs every Monday and uses my family’s takeaway as the venue. This is inspired by other chess clubs that are dotted all across London, such as CsCb in Brixton.

In terms of experience, I am an amateur who has dabbled on random projects here and there. I have used Canva to create posters of Warwick Esports society (Example 1 and Example 2) and recently have picked up Figma to flesh out UI/UX for my start-up.

Design Evolution

Design 1 v1 was not good… it lacked clear visual direction. The font was not engaging as only size and colour were utilised to create differences. Without a clear hierarchy, the information was given in one big ‘splat’.

Whilst the design was not good, I believe my vision for it was unique. I intended to use line drawings of chess pieces with circles placed along the path of the line. This would imitate the diagrammatic Tube map designed by Harry Beck. This idea was based on the venue’s proximity to a tube station. To complement this theme, I also used the same colour scheme, which was not inherently bad, but the decision of where to place the colour had no logic or reasoning behind it. I think it would be worth revisiting this concept, with a better-suited image in the middle, though (I was lazy and just browsed stock images).

Design 1 v2 veers away from the symmetrical system of laying out information to a transitional system. This builds upon the arrangement of v1’s title. I was introduced to the idea of ‘systems’ in the book Typographic Systems by Kimberly Elam. I highly recommend this book, as it presents 8 typographic systems with simple graphic diagrams, studies where various designers demonstrate the system, and real-world examples. The series of studies are particularly useful as the texts are all one size and one weight to demonstrate the legibility/readability of each system.