Dialogue

"Yoke is a duo based in Leeds with an aim to create an exhibition space that spurs dialogue between creatives."

"The objective is to encourage contributions for a week long, non profit pop up print exhibition and shop that will be held at the Leeds Corn Exchange between March 28th and April 4th 2014.

The theme of the exhibition is 'dialogue' where each creative will submit a design that will be used in a blind collaboration. Contributors must be open to their submissions being manipulated through the use of print and the match making process, that will pair the two submissions together. This will create a series of screen-printed artworks that will be displayed throughout the running of the exhibition."

Specifications

Artwork must be:
- A3 Landcape or portrait
- Vector or halftone images
- Black and white
- 300 dpi

For this brief we were encouraged to submit as many designs as we liked. Therefore, I decided to work with three different approaches: image alone, text and image, and text as image. as the designs were only allowed in black and white and they were to be printed with another design, I wanted to keep the concepts simple yet bold. 

For the first poster I thought about a minimal interpretation of 'dialogue'. I wanted to somehow communicate the concept of dialogue between two people. A common expression when talking about conversation is 'A and B conversation' A and B in this sense represents Person A talking to person B. Sometimes the phrase 'This is an A and B conversation' can imply to a third person to not get involved in this direct private conversation between two people.

Focusing on this concept, I began creating a scene of two people having a conversation- Person A and Person B.

The final text and image poster design:

For the second design, I experimented with combining open and close quotation marks, pairing one typeface with another. The reason behind this was again to act as a conversation between two people. The overlapping of the quotation marks was to show an overlap of dialogue, but also to follow the theme of the Dialogue exhibition concept of overlapping different designs. 

The final text-as-image poster design:

For the final poster, I focused on a text-only approach to represent dialogue. For this, I thought a quote on speech would be highly appropriate. Steven Pinker is a Canadian experimental psychologist, cognitive scientist, linguist, and popular science author. He has written many analytical pieces on the English Language and its functions. I thought a quote from Steven Pinker would be a more unusual and psychological approach to defining 'dialogue'. 

I looked at a few of his quotes but my favourite was this one: 

"When people talk, they lay lines on each other, do a lot of role-playing, sidestep, shilly-shally, and engage in all manner of vagueness and innuendo. We do this and expect others to do it, yet at the same time we profess to long for the plain truth, for people to say what they mean, simple as that. Such hypocrisy is a human universal."

Once I had chosen the quote, it was just a matter of choosing a favourite font. I went with one of my favourites, which I have been using more and more frequently in my work: Franchise Bold. I decided to capitalise the whole quote to make it more of a statement and easier to read from a distance as the final poster needed to be A3 size.

The final text-only poster design:

After a successful submission, I was fortunate to have my work screen printed and used in the Dialogue exhibition held at The Corn Exchange in Leeds. I was unable to make the preview evening, so I went during the week to have a look at the exhibition and take a few of my own photos.