The Cincinnati Art Museum recently ran a show on the Amazing American Circus Poster. Extraordinary pieces that ran the length of entire rooms in some cases that were wonderfully painted eons ago but maintained sometimes by sheer luck. After several rounds in-house, we were asked to have a look at it and give them our thoughts.
The size of the actual posters alone was hard to convey on such a small medium but the real problem was hierarchy… or lackthereof. Rather than focusing on a entire poster, I pulled a single compelling element out of one of them. I also pulled what seemed to be the headline out of the single line of text in the old ad and created a piece of art out of it to correspond with the image. We created a single space for the sponsors’ logos, sized down the “branding” for the show and put it together with the branding of the museum. The revised piece (on the right) provides the ad with a focal point and clear breaks of space for the secondary content.