86 BRALEY DESIGN
“This poster was based on three principles, before I even knew what those principles were,” says Michael Braley. For his second year doing a design workshop at Wichita State University, he decided to focus the workshop on poster design.

During the first year’s session, a student asked what makes a good poster. “I’d never been asked that question and never thought about it—it had been just second nature—but I stopped, thought about it and came up with ‘clarity, simplicity and impact.’ When I said it out loud, it sounded pretty good,” Braley notes. And it looks pretty good, too, as demonstrated in the second year’s resulting poster. “The concept is that people can get the meaning right away as they walk by the poster, without stopping to read it. It’s about distilling ideas into simple forms so people get it immediately,” Braley explains. And because he was designing the poster for his own talk, Braley got to use some old ideas. “Posters give me the chance to do things that never got by a client and just blow them up really big.” by Laurel Saville