The Snakes and Scribes course teaches students about the history of Celtic design/iconography, its methods, craft and relevance to the world of design. It also asks students to compare and contrast styles of visual communication among other world cultures. Students are then asked to apply these themes to a series of practical design assignments such as package design, promotional pieces or web interfaces. For the first assignment of the semester in this course, we were instructed to design a promotional piece for an event (either real or fictional) with Irish/Celtic undertones as inspiration. In order to create a successful piece, the work must appeal to both Irish natives as well as to other tourists/viewers.
I chose to create a poster design for a special screening of the classic Irish film, Into the West. This movie chronicles a fairy tale that follows the adventures of two brothers from Ballymun who receive a magical horse. In approaching the design of this poster I chose to illustrate a horse with animal qualities similar to the traits seen in The Book of Kells. In particular I tried to emulate the line qualities and traits such as body shapes and facial structures that I noticed from the traditional renderings of serpents and peacocks. The borders and curvilinear line work in The Book of Kells caused me to use ornamental line weaving for the horse’s name. As this story involves young children and falls into a comedic family drama genre, I made sure to include bright colours and playful typographical layout for the title of the film. After an initial class critique of this piece we were then asked to further apply our designs onto other materials. I decided it would be best to apply my design to a poster, DVD box, an event booklet and a ticket stub. Having been given ample time and numerous rounds of feedback on this project, I was able to develop my design to its full potential.
Samantha Palazzo – Graphic Design
Champlain College Class of 2012