Redesigning Old Work: Poster for Fashion School Application

As a part of the application to get into the Fashion Communication program at Ryerson, I submitted a fashion poster. Now that I graduated university, what better way to reflect on how far I’ve come than to redesign a poster that I submitted to get into fashion school 4 years ago?

I can’t fully recall my design rationale (if I even had one!) for the poster. I do remember being inspired by the Viktor & Rolf AW 2015/16 collection that playfully addresses the debate of whether or not fashion is art. For my application, I created a poster for a mock exhibit featuring the V&R collection.

When I found the poster, I was very happy to see that I definitely have come far in the last few years. At a first glance, I think I did a good job with making the text stand out from the background by using complementary colours. I also like the idea of the broken up letters but I think I could have executed it better.

I do think that the overall design isn’t cohesive and compelling.

While researching the Viktor and Rolf brand and the collection, I found a detail photo of one of the pieces and loved the ink droplets. I recreated that treatment in the new poster by making the main graphic look like broken pieces.

Instead of using the saturated blue and violet, I used colours from the collection for the backgrounds. I also challenged myself to redesign the poster in a way that kept some elements, such as the broken-up text and the centre-heavy composition.

Source: Viktor & Rolf

Redesigning the poster that got me into fashion school was a great way to reflect on my progress as a designer. It’s common for me to feel like I’m not improving as a creative because the progress is extremely slow and steady. I improve almost subconsciously. It’s reassuring to look back at old work and see how bad it is.