Poster boy

That would be Akshat, leading light of the Graphic Design Club at… actually, I have no idea which campus he belongs to.  GN1 probably.  I met him there once, so it seems most likely.  It was him and his team that were charged with the task of creating a poster for Aesop.  In the nick of time actually, since there is some pressure on him to get it done.  Not only because of the poster itself, but because the intention is to use the same design for the programme (or what they call the brochure.)  As well as the invitation to apply for tickets.  And that needs to be sent out soon.

I had suggested some weeks back that it might be a good idea to get one of CMS’s artists to create an image that could be used as the central focus of a design, but at the time there had not been any real understanding that this might be of value, and so had been shelved.  And to be fair, Saba did suggest this as an option, some weeks later.  But by then, Akshat had already started work on various designs, and time was pressing, and to start from scratch at such a late stage was very risky.

One of the main problems was that the school seemed to regard this as purely a graphic design issue.  And it was proving really quite a challenge to persuade Akshat’s team to focus on the right sort of image.  They knew Aesop was based on Greek stories, that almighty Zeus was a character, and that it featured animals, and all three of these led them down blind alleys.  The production was set in India, not Greece; our Zeus appears a couple of times only, and is a bumbling old fool; and although the characters are named after animals, they are all human.  So there were some  misconceptions to work through.

Saba asked Akshat for four separate designs, so that we could choose the best (which may also have dissipated his energies.  All the more so since it seemed the rest of his team had abandoned him to focus on their upcoming exams (which he had too!)  Of the four, the only one that seemed to me to be even close was the one comic one.  The others were fine ideas, but for other plays entirely.  And the comic one suffered from serious flaws.  It still featured Zeus, and still had real animals… as well as random hot air balloons and Italianate buildings.  But it appeared a final design was needed by Monday, so there was no time to send him back to the drawing board.  At least this version highlighted the comedy, and after a suggestion to me, the violence.

Saba did try to steer me to a safer option (shown above)– I have no idea how the school management, especially Geeta ma’am, is going to react.  And I have suggested using photos of pairs of the characters, in costume, for other purposes: stand-ups, I think they call them here.  If we had begun earlier, we might have been able to come up with something less jokey, but which still reflected the actual production.  But we are where we are.  How CMS reacts is up to them.