Library Alcove Display Posters, August 2011

Western display both shown alone (right) and installed into the alcove display area.

Every month our library creates a large format poster for what we call our "alcove display" area. This is part of a wall that is recessed and includes a waist-high set of bookshelves set into it. The wall above the bookshelves has a large bulletin board mounted to it that measures 116x69 inches (it also has angled corners at the top that reduces the width to 83 inches at its narrowest width).

In August, our adult services display team wanted to bring attention to the variety of fiction book collections they have: Science Fiction / Fantasy, Western, Urban, Romance, and Mystery. They wanted to create a separate display dedicated to each of the genres, posting a new one each week. This seemed like a good idea until they said they wanted to create, then mount each poster over top of another one so that after one had been seen for a week all they would have to do is tear off the top-most poster to reveal the next one mounted underneath. It was an inspired concept, but the request came too late to create all five posters before the first one needed to be seen.

Instead, we decided to create and pin up posters as their appropriate weeks arrived. This gave me more time to develop displays that didn't need to be hung right away. Even with that extra time, however, my workload to create other marketing communication projects only allowed me time enough to complete two of the five desired for the month.

Sci-Fi poster shown as intended (top) and lightened for printing
(bottom) so that it will output to appear like the top poster image.

To create visuals for these posters, I often source for both illustrative and photographic images from domain free websites, as well as from my existing archives of images. As is usually the case, the final visual is a result of pursuing design intentions that are compromised by whatever images I'm able to find and/or create. And, as it sometimes happens, a concept can take on a new direction and life of its own that wasn't originally envisioned--hopefully for the better.

Technical limitations always present drawbacks as well, such as having a great small photo that couldn't be enlarged to the needed poster size without becoming overly pixelated, or the time when a printer leaked ink all over the poster print, or when the printer couldn't digest a complex image file and left large, unprinted areas where an image should have been. Nevertheless, we do the best that be done to fulfill the initial intention of the project, whether it be resourcing for new images, living with great but pixelated visuals, or patching together sections of a poster that didn't print correctly. 

The Sci-Fi poster installed.

Sometimes, I even have to "trick" our large format printer by lightening the digital image so much that you wouldn't think it could be used. But because our larger format printer prints darker than what is seen on the computer monitor, the final image would come out closer to what you saw on screen before lightening the image. You can see a before/after example of this on the Sci-Fi poster.