"Find your Balance" is a recruitment slogan used by WorleyParsons Ltd. and has been in use to great success since 2009. It's target demographic is new engineering graduates—millennials—and focuses on how WorelyParsons helps its employees achieve good work-life balance by featuring its young engineers-in-training pursuing their passions outside of work. In this poster, a young automation engineer is showcasing her passion for teaching traditional Chinese dance.
The focus of this poster series is the person—as it has always been in the past iterations of this campaign. This is reflected in the generous use of white space and the very spare copy. The combined message of "Find your balance." along with the person's name, work discipline, and extracurricular passion, makes for a succinct yet effective message. The use of calligraphy gives this particular poster a great traditional flair which is meant to give tribute to the person's heritage.
These very same visuals have been used in recruitment exhibits which stand out against the visual noise of other exhibitors who tend to show pictures of refineries and drilling operations. Millennials—the target audience—are drawn to WorleyParsons' booth, specially when they realize the people who are there to meet and engage them are the very same young people featured in the 8-ft tall tradeshow banners. This is refreshingly different from the usual VPs with memorized spiels.
The poster was commissioned by the Ukraine Millennium Foundation for Luminous Voices—Calgary's premiere professional chamber choir that featured sacred compositions by prominent Ukranian composer, Artem Vedel
Byzantine art is rife in Ukraine, and hard to escape when creating visuals for a sacred concert. I used a classic mosaic figure of the Byzantine Christ, but thought it unusual to just focus on its most striking detail—the eyes. Matching that starkness with equally stark typography which echoed hues from the mosaic, to me, was the best approach, especially after having listened to some recordings of maestro Vedel. I used typographic 'incidents' to create an imaginary line leading down from the eyes to create a visual sequence in the text.
The client (UMF) was very surprised by the layout, and was not what they had expected, having commissioned artists in the past. It was easy to create abbreviated versions of the poster for Facebook banners and the like. The concert was a great success and was well attended.
This is part of a poster series for Spiritus Chamber Choir's 2013-2014 season.
This being a lenten version of Messiah, the choice of purple for a background was an easy one. The typography is a delicate balancing act, particularly fitting the names 'George' and 'Frideric' in the spaces flanking the diaeresis of the umlaut (which is why I chose his lesser-known birth name, which needed less massaging to fit. The stylized crown of thorns above was necessary, not just for balance, but for the audience to remember the suffering of the crucifixion without resorting to more graphic means.