Fifteen graphic design students’ posters are on display for the Birmingham Zoo’s 60th anniversary after the first project of the course turned into an art exhibit in the zoo’s Predator Building.
Assistant professor Courtney Windham tasked students in her summer Graphic Processes studio with creating a poster that reflected one of the zoo’s animals while using a process similar to that of artist Hendrik N. Werkman, whose work focused on experimenting with ink rollers and typography through the letterpress printing process.
“It’s a great project to start getting students familiar with where typography as a whole graphic design stems from, so that’s why we talk about (Werkman) first,” Windham said.
The students pulled the name of a zoo animal category out of hat, researched it and gathered details about their animal to highlight in their poster while incorporating the animal’s name into the design, Windham said.
Students carved letterforms out of chipboard material and ran ink over them through a press, which printed a textured impression onto the paper.
Leighton Guerrero, senior in graphic design, used the press to reproduce the texture of a flamingo feather he printed and cut out. He combined the texture with the shape of the flamingo—specifically its neck and beak—to execute his design.
“The way this project was is you didn’t want to do a very obvious-looking animal,” Guerrero said. “It’s kind of an abstract type project. I wanted people to recognize it was a flamingo, but I wanted them to have to look at it a little harder.”
The students scanned their presswork and used programs like Adobe InDesign and Illustrator to manipulate compositional elements such as color and layout.
“That’s kind of their learning how to use the computer and how to use handmade elements at the same time,” Windham said.
Madison Champion, sophomore in graphic design, drew inspiration from low poly vector art, which digitally renders an image as a collection of geometric shapes, to give her tiger poster a dual meaning of camouflage.
“He’s hiding in the foliage in the actual image, but to see the tiger better, you have to stand far away,” Champion said. “If you get up to it, it just seems like a bunch of shapes, so it kind of hides him in the actual foliage and in the image.”
Roger Torbert, vice president of the Birmingham Zoo’s education department, said Windham approached him about displaying the posters after the students completed the project, and he was excited to exhibit their work.
“The posters were fun and captured the whimsical nature of many of the animals,” Torbert said. “I was also impressed by the artists’ ability to communicate so much using the minimal, basic features of the animals—patterns, shape, color, movement.”
The posters, which display art of animals such as sea lions and tortoises, will remain on display at the zoo until mid-December.
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