Initially, I couldn’t help but feel the fatigue of illustration when I read the title of this assignment, in a rather amusing way. Considering how ambitious I often get in the creative process, at some point I begin to make myself overwhelmed and subconsciously give up on the task altogether. To avoid jumping to that “level of imagination” I decided to reduce the content of the poster to two or three elements including the title and subtitle. Which basically meant title, followed by subtitle, below which is one character representing (as mentioned in the exercise brief) a certain age group.

Before anything else, I had to find a museum to base these posters on, and I’d rather it wasn’t any of the more familiar ones I’d seen during my visits to London. Recently, a museum rose to prominence in my city, Mumbai, with a lot of exhibits being as old as the country itself. I hadn’t been there enough to times to remember each exhibit but as I am writing this it as actually under maintainance which is why I couldn’t go there myself. That said, it is one of the most well kept museums in the country.

Interestingly, I actually started with a mind map this time, I’ve realised there is no single way of approaching this because aligning yourself with a certain approach that you may have seen work well with someone may not necessarily be compatible with your individual thought process. And this is, honestly, a very new development because ever since I was introduced to the process when I was in school, I’ve hated resorting to it because of how methodical and meticulous it ends up becoming.

The approach was simple this time, I just split the central audience topic into three subtopics based on the provided age groups: Child (5-9), Teenager (13-16) and General Adult Audince. Following this I just thought of things that each age group could possibly relate to in the museum.

Following this I started designing characters for the poster.

To be honest I might give this another go in the future, but for now I went with very simple ideas to execute. The sketches involved very people of the three age groups interacting with exhibits in a way that they could relate with them or have some sort of a conversation with them, so in that sense it metaphorical in nature. And it also presents the people of each age group behaving the way a member of each generation would generally behave today.

Finally, the poster. I had to adjust the first one to fit the Indian historical context a little more. And I added a slightly sassy dialogue to it too to add to the humour of the child wearing exaggeratedly oversized armour. And cleaning up the basic sketches for the other ones. I ended up using Adobe illustrator for the actual poster creation.