Design Conversations Poster Series

THE SPARK

Many, many posters are not afforded quite the level of detailed attention nor the respect they deserve. Quick and dirty, nasty typographic jobs, poor structure or even ultimately failing to communicate their message clearly. When tasked with designing a set of posters for the Vignelli Center Design Conversations lecture series, I sought to divert! I consider myself a serious disciple of the poster as a medium, and therefore looked to design history as a point of reflection. There are a number of modernist designers whose poster work is always floating around in my design mind, such as Saul Bass, Paul Rand, Jacqueline Casey, Muriel Cooper, Lella and Massimo Vignelli, Alvin Lustig, Lester Beall… and many more. Learning from their modernist sensibilities and applying them to a contemporary context, I hoped, would provide a visual cue to the viewer that this event was a place that held a great regard for design. 

The work of Jacqueline Casey and Muriel Cooper at MIT was particularly inspiring and a clear display of Vignelli’s ideals of good design: “visually powerful, intellectually elegant, and above all, timeless.” In their work, I was struck by the simplicity of their designs: their typography was clean but flawless, and their careful interactions of image, color, and typography with very little visual clutter. The work of Javier Viramontes in the previous year’s posters was also personally inspirational, similarly for its sparse, clear, communicative approach to the brief.  In my designs, I sought to similarly cut through the visual noise provided by the environment and other posters, and focus on pure communication of concept, hoping to catch the eye of the like-minded design lovers on campus. 

The inspiration for the posters’ imagery stems from the idea of the spark of inspiration. It is an idea oft discussed in creative circles and also a question often brought up in these Design Conversations. Many times, students ask the speaker what inspires them in their work. While certainly something worth discussing, revealing further insight into the speakers’ process I wanted to turn this image onto the students instead, inviting them to draw inspiration from the speaker. The nexus point of the spark refers to the speaker, and the different lengths of the line refers to how different students might find themselves with different takeaways from the lecture. These lectures are meant to present students with the opportunity to experience professional perspectives on both the creative life and the creative career– a vast and varied topic that often broadens far beyond what is discussed in the classroom. While visually quite simple, the posters are completely scaffolded by the grid beneath it, and each element on the poster refers to it.

(“The grid is everything,” after all.)

In the Fall semester lineup, I used this spark motif complemented by a colorful circle that referred to some thing regarding the speakers’ career. For example, the unique spark designed for Chuck Cerankosky is reminiscent of a martini glass, as Cerankosky is the co-owner of several renowned restaurants and is the founder of the Rochester Cocktail Revival, a celebrated week-long festival that showcases the region’s cocktails and bars. The colors, rather, were chosen more with their ability to work together as a set, though still referring to their speakers’ work though perhaps not always exactly with a clear one-to-one reference. The yellow used for Chris Bailey is drawn directly from Bailey Brand Consulting’s logo. For the Spring lineup, I chose to work off of the existing framework, so the posters felt like a complete set rather than two separate design concepts. At the same time, I did not want the posters to feel so identical that they could get mistaken for the previous’ semesters. Thus, a new set of sparks and colors were produced to reference the new, upcoming speakers.

Hannah Nettikadan, 2025