So this is a little story about how a University can squish any creative life out of a project…

A little back story: My sister is about to finish her degree, and as part of her final show she was given the task of designing a poster. She asked me to come up with a design based on an idea she had of a girl reading a book - seemed simple enough.

I drew something up and sent it to her to show to her tutor (see: Version 1). She loved it, she passed it around the rest of the students involved and they all loved it too. I’m rather influenced by 60s/70s colour schemes and poster design and therefore added in some of that. I also decided to use 70s style fonts as it went with the overall look of the poster.

Unfortunately, the tutor involved didn’t think it reflected well on the University to not feature the University prerequisite colours and therefore word was passed back to me to change that (see Version 2). Ok, we thought, looks a little yucky but hey - it was well received other than that! Think it would be that simple, huh?

For some reason or another, the tutor involved then thought it would be important to note that: in usual University documents, the University logo is featured in the top right corner. Right, ok. She then forwarded a .pdf document (69 pages long, I might add) which detailed the *exact way* University documents were created. What colours, fonts, font sizes, and margins were and were not appropriate when creating a document to be used as a promotional tool for the University.

This is when we started to get a little shirty and I created Version 3, entitling it ‘Version Ugly’ and we sent it off again for the tutor’s approval.

It came back - surprise surprise - with a note saying something along the line of ‘you can keep the logo where you had it before… but you must change the font to the standard Gill Sans’.

And… I give you Version 4.

Out goes a poster that was once inspired by 60s/70s poster design - promoting an interesting and exciting looking evening of poetry and performance. In comes what looks like the front cover to a boring primary level reading book. The girl looks like she is hating every minute of the lurid rainbow that pores out of the book’s spine.

Great~