Craft Wars Event Poster

Craft Wars is an event spurred by the 40th anniversary of Poetry 74, a conference that was marked by a confrontational clash in views on the politics and purpose of verse.

The stipulation that we set ourselves from the outset was that we would do the posters in single colour for the sake of printing cost. This could have been any colour but naturally black and white made sense due to the nature of the topic and the relationship with printed type. We initially experimented with an entirely typographic approach where we developed the clashing, overlapped ‘craft wars’ type design that you see in the poster but later decided that we needed to use an image to create more tension.

One of the images that we liked was the cover for Missing Person by Adil Jussawalla (attached) and we toyed with the idea of an explosion of printing ink powder over the face of a model something that cropped up while we were looking at Spoek Mathambo’s cover of ‘Control’ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UKfwSFI8LhQ - ultimately, due to budget constraints, we stuck with just the powder but the image still retains the tension we were looking for.