 Hi, welcome to Design at Home. I'm Emily, an educator at Cooper Hewitt-Smithsonian Design Museum. Today we're going to talk a little bit about how graphic designers use elements such as color, line, and composition to visually convey a message, and we'll be putting that into practice ourselves designing a poster for an event. We'll start by getting some inspiration from posters in the Cooper Hewitt collection. First, we'll start by looking at this poster, which you'll see on the screen, designed as part of the Herman Miller Summer Picnic series. Herman Miller is a furniture company that sells really well-designed objects, and every year they host an annual summer picnic for their employees. For that picnic, they create a yearly poster. These posters, made with really bright, colorful, and simple graphics, visually convey something that you might find at a summer picnic. Some of the other posters in the series feature popcorn or an ice cream cone. In the example you see on the screen, what do we see? We're looking at a watermelon, right? But how do we know that? The colors that are used to design this poster are really vital to how we see and understand what is being depicted. The red, green, and black that we see in this poster, as well as the way that they're arranged, or the composition, are really key to communicating this message of a watermelon, that is what we're looking at. We can imagine, if we can use our imagination a little bit here, that if there were no colors on this composition, we might see something different, or it might not be apparent to us what we're looking at. Or, if everything were arranged differently with all the colors on the page, we might also see something different. So we can see that both the color and the composition here are really key to communicating what it is that we see. Let's look now at another example from the Cooper Hewitt Collection. In this poster, which we see on the screen, there is another really important design element which is being used to convey a message. In this case, that is line. On this poster, we see four thick curving lines which come together to create a recognizable image. In this case, what we see is the Guggenheim Museum, located on Museum Mile in Manhattan. This museum is housed in an iconic building designed by Frank Lloyd Wright. For some, the building may even be more recognizable than some of the artworks within it. So when the Guggenheim Museum went to create this poster advertising their museum, this was a really simple and easy way to communicate their institution and bring them to mind. Now that we've had a chance to gather some inspiration from poster examples in the Cooper Hewitt Collection, let's think back to our design challenge for today. We are going to be designing a poster for an event. Now this could be an event of your choosing, or this could be an event from one of the suggestions that we have for you. This is a challenge that we've done with thousands of students from around New York City as part of our design field trip program. In the program, we suggest a few event ideas which might include a haunted house, a rock and roll concert, or a summer block party. You're welcome to think about one of these ideas as your event that you are designing a poster for, or to come up with your own event idea. As you design a poster for the event of your choosing, part of this challenge is to do this as simply as possible. How can you create a poster advertising or communicating what your event is without using any words? How can you do this just using color, line, shape, and composition? These same elements that we were looking at in those examples that we looked at just a few minutes ago from the Cooper Hewitt Collection. I hope we all may have an event idea in mind that we would like to design a poster for, and as you come up with your event idea, I would love for you all to start brainstorming. So brainstorming can mean a lot of different things and it may vary depending on your own needs for the individual design project. In this case, brainstorming may mean taking some notes of what your event idea is or what type of elements you might like to see on the page. It might mean drawing one or a few sketches, or it might mean just jumping in and keeping in mind lots of ideas that are in your head. When your brainstorm is done, you're ready to get started. So think about what type of elements you would like to feature on your poster and what materials you might like to use. In this case, because we're designing at home, we're thinking about what materials we each have available to us in our homes right now. So this will be different for all of us. Some of us may have pens and markers, some of us may have paints, some of us may have magazines and newspapers that we would like to collage, or maybe you have a different material that I haven't mentioned. Feel free to use whatever you have available to you. One last thing before you get started designing, think about what your base piece is going to be. When I say base piece, I mean the piece that you're going to build your poster on top of. So this will really be the outer limit of how big your poster is going to be. So you can use a small piece of notebook paper if this is what you have, or maybe you have a larger piece of paper or poster board that you would like to use now. Whatever you have is fine. Just make sure you're thinking about how large or small that base piece is because that is going to dictate how big the elements that you put down on your poster will also be. Go ahead and start designing. Now might be a good time to grab some tape or glue if you have it at home and if you'd like to glue or stick things down to your poster. If you don't have these things, that's okay too, and you can lay it down flat and try moving things around and see what they look like in different places. Don't forget to add some color. Color can really help as we talked about earlier, emphasize and convey the message that you're trying to get across. In this case, what event you're advertising for with your poster. So if you have colors at home that may be in the form of crayons, colored pencils, markers or paint, if you have it, go ahead and think about putting some colors down on your paper. If you don't have color at home, think about making a black and white poster. How can you use the black and white color way that you're using to your advantage? Keep working on your poster for as long as you'd like. When you're done, we would love to see what you've designed if you or an adult would like to share it with us on social media. Thank you so much for tuning in. For more ways to experience design at home, head over to our website or check out our page on the Smithsonian Learning Lab. Thank you and we'll see you next time. Bye.