Weather Compositions and Application

I started this project by selecting 4 weather phenomena that could tell a story, so I chose the words Night (which kinda became Dark), Rain, Lightning, and Thunder. I then wanted to put them in an order to tell a bit of a story, so the order went Dark, Thunder, Lightning, and Rain.

I began by printing out pages of type and cutting out the words or just cutting out the letters of the words and creating my first round of compositions by hand, pasting words and letters. I chose typefaces that I thought expressed the phenomena. Like...


Through out the compositions I tried to best express the phenomena with type by crumpling, overlaying, ripping, using the copier to create distortion and creating textures, inverting and even lighting things on fire.

I wanted to keep a dark-light-dark-light pattern through out my compositions.

After several refinements to the compositions, came my favorite part of the project, which was beginning to apply my compositions to real life situations such as billboards, buses, and even a CBS News Television interstitial.

I came up with the tag line "Your Severe Weather HQ". For the tag line I decided to use a Orange-Yellow color to represent an alert. This color choice became difficult to apply to my compositions due to readability issues, but I worked through it and developed a series that is readable without using any extra elements such as a colored bar or band set behind the text.

Working around the details of the buses was also a challenge. The compositions began to change even more as the tag line and station logo created additional problems.

Overall I enjoyed this project and am glad we were given the task to integrate these compositions into real applications. I think it helps with problem solving and over coming obstacles.