Visual Hierarchy

16 min readOct 28, 2021

C Mini, Project 2

Subject: Row House Cinema Poster

Time Frame: 2 weeks

Research:

To establish a basis for my project, I first had to, of course, know my subject. My research began on the Row House Cinema annual Drive-In event page (https://rowhousecinema.com/2021-drive-in/). This page really just gave me the information that I already knew, but it did also give me this neat photo of the event:

I found it helpful to have a visual context for the event, although the photo is too low quality for me to eventually use in my poster. Moving on, I took a look at the Row House home page (https://rowhousecinema.com/). This gave me a much better sense of what the Row House Cinema is and what it stands for in the community. It’s this nice marriage of remembering the history of the place that it’s in and providing a fun, modern space for people to exist in. Their Our Story page (https://rowhousecinema.com/story/) really helped solidify that feeling for me. The Row House creates a very friendly and approachable atmosphere, despite seemingly catering to a “film buff” style audience. Anyone can become a Row House regular, even if they’re not into the detailed artistry of film.

To round out my brief overview, I took a look at the partner for the drive-in film event: The Terminal (https://stripdistrictterminal.com/). The Terminal seems to be an urban revival program, headed by another larger company based in NYC. It all seems very gentrified to me, but I can’t be too harsh on it considering how little I know. Their project here in Pittsburgh, The Terminal, is to fix up a certain part of the historic Strip District (The Pennsylvania Railroad Fruit Auction & Sales Building) and make it into a hip shopping center. Still feels a little gentrify-y to me, but I don’t pass this judgement onto the Row House Cinema; I think they’re cool.

Initial Thoughts:

Coming off of Project 1, we talked a lot about a magazine’s Audience, Context, and Content. So, to begin thinking about my poster, I thought about these aspects.

Audience: The audience for the normal Row House Cinema is adults. The Row House Cinema prides itself for its rotating selection of “new, old, popular, weird, amazing, and obscure” films that change weekly, based on theme. With an adjoining bottle shop / taproom, it’s hard to confuse this as a traditional family movie theatre. With that said, this is not the normal Row House Cinema — this is the Annual Drive-In Row House Cinema. Based on their movie set list, almost every week has at least one movie that kids would be thrilled to see. They still cater to their movie-buff adult audience, but it now also includes children.

Context: This is Halloween Month. The movies are Halloween themed. Also, this takes place in the historic Strip District, specifically in The Terminal, what used to be a warehouse and distribution building; it adds a nice touch of old and creepy to an already spooky Halloween setting. It’s all very in-line with the retro feel established by the normal Row House Cinema.

Content: Given to us by Vicki. It lists the event, tagline, weekend with featured brewing company, dates, featured movies, and website link.

Part 1: Exercises to Practice Visual Hierarchy

Specifically, how to I use contrast, proximity, and alignment to create a readable and appealing composition?

Exercise 1: Stroke weights

What I enjoyed about these two iterations was how the text is blocked off. The heavier stroke weight makes different elements push out of the page, therefore separating information. Of course, the most important information to catch someone’s eye is the event (Row House Cinema 2021 Drive In) and the website (rowhousecinema.com), which allows the viewer to engage, then learn more. For 1.3, I appreciate the minimalism of bolding just the very most important information. However, it does feel a little sandwiched compared to 1.2, which also bolds the week titles. This creates a sense of importance for the different weeks, which affords to the viewer that this is not a single day, or even a single weekend event.

Exercise 2: Linespacing

These establish the same two versions of the hierarchy dichotomy I was talking about for Exercise 1; what’s more important, the weeks or the blocks of information? However, working with linespacing feels distinctly different from stroke weight. The line spacing gives a nice sort of breathing room to the information, whereas the stroke weight made thing stand out/recede.

It’s almost like a different axis on which I’m editing the information. Stroke weight operates on the z-axis (inward/outward) and line spacing operates on the y-axis (up/down). Whereas I gravitated towards just the title and link being individually emphasized with Exercise 1, here I gravitate towards the weeks being separated from each other because I think it makes it slightly easier to read.

Exercise 3: Horizontal Shift: two flush-left margins

For Exercise 3, I wanted to focus on creating page “shapes”. I’m currently taking calligraphy, and something Merna talks about is the gray of a page: if you squint real hard, how gray is the page overall? I’ve translated this to “if i squint real hard at the page, what shape does it make?”. For traditional approaches, 3.4 and 3.5 work well, blocking off the information in the same way as before and catering to the typical English reading pattern of left to right. However, in terms of creating a slightly more interesting shape, I gravitate towards 3.8. It creates this nice egg shape with the text that deviates from the left to right reading structure slightly. Plus, I like egg shapes.

Exercise 4: Horizontal Shift: three flush-left margins

Now given three tabs to play with, I wanted to approach fixing the issues from Exercise 3. I think the problems I saw in my Exercise 3 structures were in large part of how fragmented the indented lines felt from the non-indented text. So, when adding in my third indent, I created an indent spacing that was much smaller than my standard space. This creates a much more connected sense between the separated parts of text. Like Vicki talked about in class, I think that these altered tab styles creates a better sense of proximity.

Exercise 5: Linespacing + two stroke weights

I was excited for this exercise because now I could work on both of the axes I was talking about before. The higher stroke weight pops out on the z-axis, but is given the breathing room of stretching out along the y-axis. In particular, I think that 5.6 was very successful. It separates out the different weeks visually, giving space to the viewer between different event dates, but it still recedes from the title and the website link, which I find to be the most immediately important.

Exercise 6: Two stroke weights + horizontal shift

I have very similar feelings for Exercise 6 that I did for Exercise 5, except this time I get to work on x and z axes instead of y and z. I really enjoyed returning to the egg shape in this exercise. I think that it really benefits from having higher stroke weight, like in 6.2 and 6.3, to help establish a more clear hierarchy than before. It also helps to reinforce the almost right-to-left reading order by guiding the reader to the right spaced information first.

Part 2: Scale and Color

To get started with scale, we practiced in class by using preset cutouts of our poster information. This was helpful to loosen up my approach to creating layouts, and breaking the grid. It’s much easier to manipulate things physically rather than digitally, so I was able to experiment a lot more than I probably would have. However, from there, I did take these designs and render (if that’s the right word) them in Illustrator.

Illustrator gave me a little more freedom with the size and stroke weight of the words, so I had a little more nuance with hierarchy. This allowed me to create a couple different iterations of the physical scale exercises that intrigued me. In particular, I enjoyed making the type quite large, up to filling up the entire page. Reflecting on these later, I enjoy the elegance of some of the smaller designs, but I don’t think that elegance is really the feeling that Row House gives off. I still think that the larger letters give a more interesting look that matches more with the Row House brand.

Color

Parallel to the scale exercise, we made a couple different color palettes based on cutouts from magazines. There were a lot of interesting colors and textures so I really enjoyed the exercise. In the end, I was really drawn to palettes that have some sort of basis in black or dark gray. Spot colors were cool, but I just as well enjoyed palettes with more color variation.

Then, using these palettes and the scale exercises created on Illustrator, I was able to apply some preliminary color to the scale exercises.

Out of these, I noticed myself really leaning into spot color and very limited color palettes. I know I’m not very good at color yet (which is OK, it’s good to know my limitations in design), so I think that a limited palette is an easy way to still include color in my work without muddying things. Anyway, I really liked the ones that were brighter colors on darker backgrounds.

Particularly, I like the vibe that the green text on gray, blue text on black, and purple text on red have.

Mid-Project, Quick Thought Check-In:

I need to remember to consider the 6 basic design principles: Proximity, Alignment, Contrast, Scale, Color.

Some adjectives to describe Row House:

Retro
Family-oriented
Nostalgic
Exciting
Inviting
Spooky
Weird
Obscure
Unique

General Comments

What sort of experience will the audience have? For something like City Theatre, it’s very niche, so you’re going for the play itself. For Row House, you could probably watch these movies at home, so you’re going for the experience at the venue
What to emphasize? City theatre: the descriptor is very important. Row house: the “drive-in” is very important.
What is the purpose of this? Who is this selling to / who do you want to bring in the door?
Leave the proportions of type alone at all costs

Part 3: Images

Going in, I had some initial concerns of selecting an image that would apply to the Row House Cinema Drive-In, without being too on the nose. For this entire poster, I’ve been trying to play into the adjectives mentioned earlier, but I don’t want to be cliche or easy with it. So, after some pondering, I started by looking for images from the movies themselves. My thought on this is that I can select an image that would be recognizable to someone familiar with the film (hitting “nostalgic”) while still not being too overtly horror.

On IMBD, I found a couple of cool shots from Night of the Living Dead, The Birds, and Beetlejuice. Old movies like these would also hit on the “retro” vibe I’m going for. The trouble with these is that because the movies are so old, their quality isn’t so good. After talking with Vicki, she presented a neat solution: I could use a halftone. Using a halftone, I could scale my images to whatever they need to be on the poster, while retaining the quality of the halftone itself. As an added bonus, it would look more retro. The only thing I needed to be careful of was making it look too comic-y.

So, I after some basic positioning in a tabloid photoshop document, I landed with two rudimentary images out of the movie still set. However, these were both black and white images, so I looked through unsplash to find one more image, this time in color, to play with. I thought this one with the TV was cool and had the type of orange I was already looking at in some of my palettes.

These were good exercises to get me started with the image process, if rough. In a sort of double edge sword, I enjoy aspects of all three. I think the color scheme of row 1 is the most unique, I like the aspects of text treatment in row 2, and I like the visual consistency in row 3.

Takeaways from talking with Yoshi:

Cut down on treatments of type: that way the poster feels more intentional and consistent
Play w image placement: the image doesn’t need to be the entire poster. you can cut it off with a rectangle. there is no rule against it
Play with halftone treatment: text not readable. how much halftone is too much halftone? how much halftone is too little halftone?
How to make the text feel more like the halftone: the text currently feels a little disparate

Takeaways from Vicki:

Scale decisions are nice and the text creates visual tension with the edge of the page (like a horror film).
Dot halftone effect may be impeding readability of the content
TV seems lonely
Try looking for an eerie or haunting abstract image
The variations where I try side by side content (weekend and sponsor left, movies right) seems less effective than the list in one column. Pay attention to proximity

With these discussions in mind, I moved onto some more iterations. I kind of threw out the TV idea at this point, in favor of trying to look for a more abstract image. Of the free free-use images, these were my favorites:

I think I was intrigued more by the car image than the vines, but given how much time was left to work on the project before the final crit (3 days by the time I approached this), I decided it would be a better use of my time to just push forward with a concept I was already working on rather than try and attempt something totally new. Yoshi had the good advice to pick a direction, and I think it definitely was a good choice to do so by the end.

I tried a couple new orientations with the zombie image, as well as some new edits to the girl with the knife. In the end, I iterated a lot more with the zombies just because I couldn’t quite get the girl with the knife to work, and the composition of the zombies gave me a bit more freedom.

To create my zombie image, I took the original screen capture from Night of the Living Dead and added a gradient on top of it to black and behind it to give a little more dimensions. Then, I run it through the halftone. This ensures that the halftone is printed all the way down my page in the black. It’s subtle, but I like it. I set my halftone at 6pt. radius after experimenting with a couple prints of halftone.

The 8pt. radius seemed too large and the 4pt. radius was a tad smaller than I would have liked. Keeping it at 6pt. meant that I got the halftone look with a still readable image. From afar, you can’t tell there’s a halftone at all, but I don’t mind that so much. It’s almost like you go back in time the closer you get to the poster.

Moving onward, I decided to go with the zombie composition with the red text. At this point, I was drawn towards how striking the red text was.

Going about making these iterations, I moved a lot on a couple questions I posed for myself and some gut instinct. What if I used all capitals? What if “pop-up…” is more subtle? What if I flipped the angle of the text? This process of iteration was very “head down, do the work” but I think I needed that to push my poster further. In the end, I liked a less subtle “pop-up”, all-caps title, and a positive angled text.

However, it was also at this point I was talking to some friends and they expressed a lot of interest in some of my other color schemes, especially the green. I suppose that as I was staring at my iterations, I lost sight of my different options, which totally happens sometimes. So, I made three versions.

Looking at all three side by side, I was definitely drawn to the green, and the other people I showed the posters to agreed.

I think that in a poster project like this, I need to think about people being drawn into the poster as much as I, the designer, like the poster, so I hold other people’s opinions about equal with my own opinion, if not a little more. It doesn’t matter if I love the poster as a designer if it doesn’t do its job. That is to say, the obvious choice is green.

It’s a fun green too, it hits the horror movie nod without being too overtly horror, which I think the red was bordering on. With a bit of tweaking, this was the poster I turned in for final crit:

Part 4: Post Final Crit

Andrew gave me the excellent critique that I’m not actually being brave with my letters. I want to be brave, but I’m just not being brave currently. That and the green doesn’t lead the viewer around the page properly. Those two tidbits were spot on, and gave birth to four more iterations with more green and bigger text.

And, while these were already much more impactful than my first version, I recalled I had an idea I had much earlier in the process, but strayed away from: textured type. I had decided upon not using texture in my text earlier in fear that the poster would feel too busy with textured text and halftone together. I think that would be true with the smaller text, but with the larger text, I have a little bit more room to play.

I emailed Langston Wells (who’s TA-ing digital imaging this year!) and he gave me some advice for how to approach texturing. I found a couple high-res paper textures and brought my text in as png into Photoshop (this was to retain the proper size and spacing with the text).

Going between a crumpled paper look and a folded paper look, I noticed I was running into the issue I was afraid of — the crumpled paper look was too busy with the halftone background. I still want the emphasis to be on the halftone texture, and the crumpled look was drawing away from it. However, only the single fold didn’t quite seem textured enough. In my final version, I duplicate the folded paper texture and rotate it 90 deg. to form a vertical and horizontal fold. It’s almost like someone has pre-folded the poster… can you say “nostalgic”?

I briefly experimented with doing something way more experimental with the letters, to try to push it even further, but in the time I had, I couldn’t quite make it work. I think it’s a cool concept though, and I may try to refine it with the Thanksgiving break (given I’m not too far deep in the typography project).

To re-approach the funky letters, I would try to plan more around the list of movies and show dates. I briefly tried to split them up and put them in different parts of the poster, but I felt that the proximity element wasn’t all the way there; so maybe that’s an idea I could try as well. I really do think it has potential, but time limitation is something I have to be mindful of.