Creating a poster for the symposium

Before, after, or instead of reading this posting, read our guidelines for working with Creative Services to develop promotional materials at this posting: "Creating a Poster with Columbia's Creative Services."

During Week 6 we've created a poster to bring to Creative Services to promote our symposium on Wednesday, May 12, 4-6 pm in the Hokin Auditorium, 623 S. Wabash, first floor. (Please join us! Tell your students about this event!)

Kristen and I (Kate) asked our students about design ideas and preferences. Kristen had a more extended conversation with her students which she might share on the blog or within this post. On Monday I passed out a photocopy of an idea that Maureen and I had discussed the previous week. I wanted them to have something they could take apart and reconstruct.

I was inspired by this fantastic Critical Encounters poster:

Isn't it fantastic? I liked the idea of the squares because I feel like we have so much information to get across with this poster -- that it's sponsored by both Critical Encounters & First Year Writing, that it's Writing & Rhetoric II students presenting, time & location, etc.

Maureen and I visualized photos of our students, some boxes with obscured text to communicate that we're a writing class, a photograph of a microphone, and all of the information I included above -- the departments, the class, time, location.

Here's what our sketch looked like:

This is what Kristen and I gave to our students to reconstruct.

Kristen's students wanted the poster to show ears, people listening to express that the students presenting will be speaking to an audience. One of her students drew a close-up of a profile speaking to other students, seated, listening.

I told my students that I had searched for images that conjoin fact and faith or even science and religion (though we try to encourage/remind them that science and religion are not the limitations or only definitions of fact and faith) but that everything I found was pretty horrible. One of my students drew Jesus in a lab coat. Apparantly there was some mix up in the English Department because I didn't find her drawing in my mailbox before Kristen and I needed to nail down a design for Creative Services.

Kristen and I met up and discussed our students' responses. Kristen's students had also mentioned an interest in birds and trees -- both images of science and religion. So we went with that idea. Here's our sketch of the ad:

We're taking it to Creative Services tomorrow. We'll let you know how that goes.