Nuit Blanche Arts Festival
Nuit Blanche is an annual all-night arts festival in Paris, France. For this assignment we were tasked with creating a poster for a festival, convention, or event. I chose to work with the Nuit Blanche art festival because it challenged me to work with type in a different language, and I enjoyed the concept of the festival.
A cornerstone of this project was learning about the context of advertisements and knowing the audience, so I narrowed down the attendees into three categories: the tourist, the art lover, and literally anyone—anyone in Paris, of course. Given how Nuit Blanche is free to the public, it’s safe to say that it isn’t some kind of exclusive event. This poster needed to grab the attention of the average passerby, regardless of their opinion on art or their itinerary for visiting Paris.
Preliminary Sketches
While researching past posters for the Nuit Blanche festival, I notices a lot of them were very nondescript with little to no information on what was actually going to be featured at the festival—no artist names, installations, or special guests. With that in mind, I wanted to move forward focusing on a single installation or guest on the poster so to intrigue the viewer, but not to overwhelm them.
We were also encouraged to think of these advertisements in different contexts beyond the primary poster; would this same design be applicable elsewhere?
Developing a call to action:
“Les Meilleures choses arrivent apres tonbee de la nuit.”
In other words: “The best things happen after dark.”
Given how the festival takes place in France, I did have to do some translating. Nuit Blanche translates to “white night,” which is an homage to how the festival features a lot of illuminating installations, and the festival lasts from sundown to sunrise. In this case, it implies a “sleepless night.” I chose this phrase to as a call to action because it’s enticing, almost flirtatious or sext. This festival is one of the better things, and it does in fact, happen after dark.
Final Product
Ideally these posters would be displayed throughout Pairs and sparsely throughout neighboring cities. I really liked the idea of the posters alternating between black and white to make up a larger display, but I tried to make them so that they could be successful on their own. I chose to go with a wheat-pasted mockup because it has a rather artistic and handmade feel to it, which aligns with the fact that it is and arts festival.
As for my choice in subject, I chose to go with a guest musician because I imagined that it would be a lot more enticing to the average passerby. A lot of this project dealt with knowing your audience and figuring out how to best capture the attention of potential attendees. Nuit Blanche is open to the public with no reservations or ticket fees, therefor the average attendee is likely not going to be overly-familiar with artists. Displaying a guest with a lot more recognizability would encourage more people to attend.
