Visuals

These are the digital versions of my six posters.

This is my display and how I chose to present it to my mentor, Bekka.

This is the side view of my display, with a hidden compartment for a blue-tooth speaker.

This is Bekka, my mentor, holding her gift!

Project Statement

This project explores the idea of containment and information gathering through the creation of a gift for a selected mentor. For my mentor, Bekka, I created a series of six music posters titled “Morning Coffee”, “Rainy Day”, “Forever Summer”, “I Am Where My Feet Are”, “Cleaning The Kitchen”, and “Abby’s Top Picks”. Each poster contains the code to a playlist that has around 30-40 songs within it that are associated with the moods they represent. I created each poster on Illustrator and all the playlists on Spotify. The reasoning behind my gift stems from Bekka’s love for music. During our initial conversations, she repeatedly told me about her love for music and how her dream job would be working at a traveling festival where she could design marketing materials. Based on this, I knew immediately I wanted to make her something related to her favorite songs and I thought interactive playlist posters were a great way to do this. Not only did I get to learn more about what she listens to but she also gets to do the same now because I included some of my favorite songs within each playlist. Beyond this, I wanted her to be able to display the posters as functional decor so I built her a flippable stand with a hidden compartment for a blue-tooth speaker.

Process

View detailed project process at Gifting Design: Process

Reflection

This project is something I’ve proud to say I created. Bekka and I have a very similar style of design that we favor so I found it really exciting to be able to create my own posters using it as inspiration. I struggled initially a lot more than I’d like to admit because there were several effects that I wanted to use but genuinely couldn’t figure out how to do. I watched more youtube tutorials than I can even remember and still some stuff felt impossible. While this led me to simplify a few of the posters in ways I wasn’t thrilled about, I got to really harness my pre-existing Illustrator skills while creating them and I consider this a good thing. As for the playlists within the posters themselves, they were so much fun to curate. I’m an Apple Music user so figuring out Spotify and how its playlist codes work threw me for a learning curve at first. Once I figured it out and finalized my gift, it was so rewarding to give it to Bekka. She seemed like she really enjoyed it and was looking forward to listening to everything, so that made everything worth it in the end.