Universal Declaration
of
Human Rights
For our second project, we were given the task of designing a poster for an article on the Universal declaration of human rights of our choice using methods and techniques we’ve been taught from previous classes and studies.
I began by looking into the different articles and selected a few that I felt comfortable working with.
The articles in question were the following:
- Article 3: Everyone has the right to life, liberty and security of person.
- Article 6: Everyone has the right to recognition everywhere as a person before the law.
- Article 13;1: Everyone has the right to freedom of movement & residence within the borders of each state.
- Article 23;2: Everyone, without any discrimination, has the right to equal pay for equal work.
From the chosen articles I began brainstorming ideas and what I could do using typefaces and designs inspired by the old masters of graphic design. I researched Josef Müller-Brockmann, Wim Crouwel as well as Jacqueline Casey. I chose to research and look into Swiss design as well as Modernism for this project for a change. Since I’m not too familiar with how them and wanted to learn something new.
We were given clear instructions on what we should and shouldn’t do for this project, given very limited things to work with. Since we are supposed to stay away from imagery and illustrations and mainly use typefaces, size, colours, and shapes to create with.
Before I began with the research I wrote down ideas for the selected articles and what I could do with the posters to represent the article the best way.
Here are all of the ideas that I had for the design of the possible poster for each article.
After carefully looking at my possible options that I already ran some ideas for I felt the most comfortable working with article number 6 since I had more ideas and could create a better creative outcome for the poster with what I had in mind compared to the other articles I found interesting.
Research, Sketching & Digitalizing
A few things that I really want to convey in my poster is to properly represent the law as well as the importance that you as an individual has to be treated equally as the individuals in said country. That you as an individual have the right to a fair trial and public hearing. I wanted to highlight how to, with the use of colours and other graphic elements to portray the image of ‘law’ as well as how to highlight the importance of the article and our rights as human beings.
I drew up a few ideas, taking inspiration from the Modernist and Swiss art movements. I chose to use a lot of geometry and hard shapes in my work, inspired by multiple law and solicitor websites and designs they’ve used in pamphlets and other graphic designs. I also took a lot of inspiration from my understanding of the word Law and the imagery surrounding it.
During my idea process, I also took the time to study what typefaces were commonly used in court documents, that being typefaces much similar to Arial as well as Times New Roman. So I was given options to use both Serif typefaces as well as Sans Serif typefaces.
I began looking into what typefaces I could use to also make it look aesthetically pleasing for the viewer, also make it related to the typefaces I previously mentioned. I looked into what fonts had similar characteristics in Google fonts as well as Adobe fonts. After spending some time on both of those websites I decided to go for the following fonts: Century (Old style) as well as Gill Sans. I wanted the option to use both a serif typeface as well as a sans serif typeface. After some research online about what fonts court documents were also using I decided to play around with Helvetica.
For this project, I also spoke to people that were studying law about what colour would be heavily used in court, I also used the internet for my source. I was told that blue and red was heavily used, especially when it comes to dressing codes. I decided to look further into it and researched what colour scheme solicitors and law firms used for their graphic design on websites as well as pamphlets and posters.
For this project, I also chose to look into the Swiss and Modernist art movement more in-depth. These two art movements are rather new for me and I wanted to use them as inspiration since the art movements I’ve previously been very close to has been dadaism and surrealism.
The type of research I made of these art movements was the structure of the design and how I could use it to my advantage in graphic design.
I looked into how designers, such as Josef Müller-Brockmann, Wim Crouwel, given to us for research from our course leader, as well as Jacqueline Casey.
Their work is heavily based on Typography as well as a few design elements using the basic forms (such as points, lines and planes) to make some advanced and unique designs. Wim Crouwel and Josef Müller-Brockmann use a lot of grids in their works, whilst you can see that Jacqueline Casey uses them for structure. Something else these three designers have in common is using high contrast colours that oppose each other to create a strong visual design.
I chose to use opposing colours as well as an 8px grid when I was going to create my poster for this project. I also chose to work with Illustrator in this project since I’m more comfortable using it as well as more experienced in it compared to Figma. Illustrator gives me more freedom in creating a digital design.
I, unfortunately, didn’t have many print screens of my progress but here are the digital versions as well as alternations during my progress. Whenever I moved on to do alternations I made another artboard to show my previous ideas and what I moved on doing with the alternations.
This is my first design out of a few that I made. I wanted to play around with the general aesthetic of what information I could gather from Law firm and Solicitor websites and other designs they chose to have representing them. I also added a few lines to look like a classic prison cell door opening up next to the text which is article 6. I chose to use three colours in this design; navy blue, gold and white.
For the second design that I chose to proceed with, I wanted to play around with planes as well as geometric shapes to make an interesting visual design. I decided to make a triangle using white with 25% opacity to create a lighter and mute navy to fit the navy. Using the outlines of the triangle I chose to make a plane that would cut of where the triangle ended. I thought during the sketching process that it would add a nice touch.
I wasn’t too happy with the outcome of the design so I tweaked it a little bit to see if I could make it better.
Here is one of the tweaked versions of my design that I wasn’t too happy with, the tweaked version didn’t go as expected, I enlarged the word Law and removed the gold plane. This version didn’t work as well as the previous one and didn’t fit my liking at all, so I scrapped it as well.
I experimented a little bit more with the previous design again and moved the article bit of the text. Which once again didn’t work out so
I moved on to the next design.
For this design, I chose to take several elements of several sketches and merge them to see what I could create.
Overall I was happy with the design, using the bars again as well as a scale that I made myself using planes, points and planes in Illustrator. I also made the decision to use several hues of navy blue to experiment with. Overall I was pleased with this design but I remembered that we were advised to stay away from imagery in our designs so I chose not to use this one as my final design. I decided to keep this design in the post to show my progress for the work that I did. I also did an alternative version of this design using red for a change, and also try to work the colour into the design since it’s a very important colour in court and law.
Here is the alternate version of my design using the colour red to see what it looked like.
This is my last and final design. I chose to experiment with the first image using Red, as the previous design to also be able to emphasise more important words without using the size or thickness of the font.
I was very happy with this design, even though I was very hesitant to use red, but was encouraged to do so to push outside my own comfort zone.
The final design
This is my submission for my final design of the project. I feel very confident with this design and I feel like it really represents the article really well with the visuals.
I also decided to put this poster on a photoshop poster mockup.
Final thoughts
This project was a big learning point for me. I decided to go outside my own comfort zone to create something I haven’t previously done.
I used colours and techniques that have been taught to us during class and during my own self-studies to learn more about how to compose a design well using grids as well as other design systems.
I’m overall very please and confident with my final design as I said previously and I learnt a lot during this project that I will use in the future for more designs and other projects that will cross my path.
Thank you.