Project overview
The goal of this project was to design a series of posters for a poetry reading event, Altered Earth: Poetic Perspectives on Planetary Shifts, highlighting three assigned poets: Hied E. Erdrich, Orchid Tierney, and Hussain Ahmed. I aimed to visually express a common theme present in all three poets’ work; the distortion human actions impose on natural forces.
Research/poet backgrounds
Heid E. Erdrich was born in 1963 in Breckenridge, Minnesota. She is Ojibwe, one of the largest Native American tribal populations, and enrolled at Turtle Mountain. She grew up in Wahpeton, North Dakota, and was one of seven siblings. She earned a B.A. in Literature and Creative Writing from Dartmouth College in 1986. she also attended Johns Hopkins University, where she graduated with a master's degree in poetry and one in fiction. She also has a PhD in Native American Literature and Writing from the Union Institute.
She has published multiple books and collections of poetry as well as various short stories and short film 'video-poems'. She is also a playwright, museum curator, and magazine editor. She writes about topics concerning the environment, womanhood, motherhood, and Native American values, culture, and life.
Orchid Tierney is a poet from Aotearoa-New Zealand who currently teaches at Kenyon College in Gambier Ohio. Her work has been widely published and has recieved multiple awards. She earned a PhD in English from the University of Pennsylvania. She is a Black Earth Institute Fellow for 2022-2025, a community that focuses on connecting spirit, earth, and society. She is currently the co-director of the Science and Nature Writing Initiative at Kenyon College.
Her writing focuses on the intersection between nature and modern society's habits and ways of thinking. Much of her work combines image and writing, and she is very passionate about type as image. She writes about human and society's effects on nature and animals and focuses on preservation of animal and plant life as well as many works focusing on climate change, specifically pollution and human waste.
Hussain Ahmed is a poet and environmentalist born in Kakuri, Nigeria. His poems have been widely published in collections as well as journals and magazines such as Poetry Magazine, Kenyon Review, American Poetry Review, Electric Lit, and A Public Space. He's won multiple awards and contests for his writing, including the 2024 Gulf Coast Poetry Contest and the 2023 Gordon Square Review Poetry Contest. He has earned a bachelor's degree from Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria, a Master of Science from Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile-Ife, and an MFA in poetry from the University of Mississippi.
Much of his writing focuses on the effects of war on individual communities and the broader earth. His writing focuses on how violence and war destroys communities along with environments both in the physical sense as well as in the spiritual. He often combines language in his poems, writing partially in English and partially in Yorùbá.
physical Experimentation and ideation
I began by experimenting with physical media, focusing on the ways i could show destruction and distortion through manipulating type in a physical realm. I found the most effective methods were playing with spacing and legibility.
digital Experimentation and ideation
Transitioning into the digital phase, I combined these physical experiments with original photography. Using Photoshop, I explored different visual directions for the final poster design by layering and compositing these elements using various techniques and filters, particularly color inversion, to create an unnatural, polluted color palette and aesthetic. I also tried pushed legibility further in this phase and really worked with scale and other ways of making the poster more eye catching.
Focused physicaL recreation
After choosing a direction, I recreated my earlier typographic experiments, this time using letters and numbers to spell out the event title, rather than using random characters.
Refinement
I then brought those updated images back into Photoshop, refining the design further. Due to the filters on the background image, I initially struggled with making the smaller text readable. I experimented with multiple different borders, which I found both improved legibility and helped frame the chaos of the composition more neatly.
Final series
Once I was satisfied with the first poster, I expanded the design into a full series. I used the custom type and layout from the first poster as a foundation to create two additional posters, each representing the other poets while maintaining visual cohesion across the series.