Lesson 15: The Poster — Message, Audience, Hierarchy
Pre A Level Art & Design · Unit 4 · U4·L1 · ← L14 | L16 →
At a glance
| Session | W16, one Wednesday double (~90 min) — Unit 4 opens |
| Date | Wed 2026-12-16 |
| Focus | What a poster must do: message, audience, hierarchy, type as voice; thumbnails for the final |
| Deliverable | CS4: one annotated poster analysis + a four-thumbnail set with type studies, one circled with a reason |
| Prepares you for | A4, which you sit next Wednesday, Wed 2026-12-23 |
| Homework | Gather or make anything the circled thumbnail needs (images, lettering references, files); MB posting |
The date above may shift when the school publishes the calendar for this period.
Goal
Every unit this semester made images that could wait to be understood. A poster cannot wait: it has three seconds and three meters to deliver one message to one audience, or it has failed. Today compresses the whole discipline into its four questions — what does it say? who is it for? what reads first? what does the type sound like? — and ends with the final poster designed in thumbnail.
How it runs
- Warm-up (10 min) — A3 collages returned with feedback; one written action each. Then the unit question, cold: a poster in the hallway — what decides whether anyone reads it?
- Teach: the four questions (20 min) — worked on exemplars, one question at a time. Message: one sentence or it isn’t one. Audience: Mucha selling cherry-blossom calendars to Parisians; a print made cheap to travel to thousands (the Ukiyo-e argument from the printmaking deck). Hierarchy: the 1860s Gsell advertisement — one name card commanding a hundred small photographs; first read, second read, third read. Type as voice: the same word in three letterings sounds like three people — L11’s text-as-image, now in charge.
- Studio 1: the analysis (20 min) — CS4 part one: take one poster from the spread (printed exemplars + the classroom deck), annotate it against the four questions, and state the first/second/third read with arrows. Plain sentences beat design words.
- Studio 2: thumbnails and type (30 min) — CS4 part two. The task: a poster for an exhibition of your own work — your A2 photo series or your A3 collage — for a real audience (this school, this hallway). Draw four thumbnails of the same poster with four different hierarchies (image-led, type-led, split, crowded-to-sparse); hand-letter the title word in two voices. Circle one thumbnail, one line why.
- Close (10 min) — CS4 collected (analysis + thumbnails + type studies). A4 is announced today: the final poster, handmade or digital, made in class next Wednesday, marked on hierarchy, typography, message, audience. Bring what your thumbnail needs.
Assessment
CS4 — thumbnail set + poster analysis — is sat and collected in this double (focus: hierarchy and audience), one week before the sitting it rehearses. A4 (Wed 2026-12-23) is announced today. Register: PAL S1 Assessments.