Project Overview
The project prompt was to create a poster for a school-wide competition to promote the event Imagine RIT. The main requirements for this poster was that it had to include the text "Imagine RIT" and "Saturday, April 27, 2024." On top of that the poster was supposed to be family friendly and promote this huge university event that showcases the special projects that college students have been working on for the past year.
Approach
2023 was my first time attending this event. I volunteered at a welcome tent to greet over 30,000 visitors that the campus held at this event last year. While exploring the event for myself, I found it very inspiring to see the many facets of RIT come to life. There were so many intriguing projects in every field RIT offers classes in – it was truly inspiring to witness. When brainstorming how I would create a poster that would capture such a huge event I knew I wanted to include as much inspiration from the projects I viewed as year as possible.
Brainstorming
Due to the open nature of the criteria of this project, I found myself struggling at where to begin looking for inspiration. Something that I found helpful was creating a mind map during the brainstorming process. The exercise forced me to quickly think of a one word answer or short phrase for each bubble. After completing the exercise, I took words that resonated most with me to use as the foundation of my poster.
AI Image Generating
The following section displays images that were generated using the AI image generating software available on Microsoft Bing. These images are not my own work and I am not trying to pass them off as my own work.
The expansion of Artificial Intelligence as given designers the tools to visualize their creative brainstorming before they begin working on their finals. I have found AI to be a helpful tool in the brainstorming process because its ability to create multiple images based off of a few random words gives me lots of ideas that I want to turn into my own. When asking AI to generate these images, I used words including TV, colorful, construction, blueprints, technology, and stripes. From the images it gave me, I knew I wanted the focal point to be a large television with colorful stripes that a TV gets when its display is damaged. I wanted those stripes to pour out of the TV and spell out Imagine RIT. I think this is a good representation of the event because this is a technology school which is symbolized by the TV. The flowing lines symbolize the overflow of creativity that the students have when creating their projects. Additionally, I created several small objects surrounding the TV to represent the many different projects and presentations that students will be giving at this event.
Takeaways
While designing this poster, I learned about the importance of visual interest to fill the space and make the poster appear cohesive. Due to the many busy aspects of this design it had the potential to look cluttered if the objects weren't intentionally placed. I also had to overcome to struggle of filling the sky area with objects that didn't need to sit on a flat plane. I played with a mix of objects that would build up into space and objects that would float in space.
If I were to do another project like this one, I would focus more on the color palette. Due to the shiny and reflective nature of Redshift materials in Cinema 4D, sometimes objects get lost in the background because of the way the light reflect off of them. While I liked all of the colors I chose as flat pigments, when I added the lighting some of them looked very similar to one another. Lighting in a 3D digital software is a factor I will more consciously think about when choosing my colors.
© 2025 Maya Probeck