The Kenyon Review Reading Series
Turning unique literary voices into one-of-a-kind posters.
Through its Reading Series, annual Literary Festival, and other events, the Kenyon Review brings renowned authors to campus to share their writing, process, and advice on campus. As the Review’s publicity intern for the past three years, I’ve created one-of-a-kind posters for a wide range of visiting writers, including Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Rita Dove and New York Times-bestselling poet and essayist Hanif Abdurraqib.
With each poster, the primary challenge is balancing the writer’s individual voice and the Review’s brand. The poster should tell potential reading attendees what to expect from a reader: Are they energetic? Experimental? Lyrical? Funny? At the same time, the poster should put the Review’s stamp on the event and signal that the literary journal’s high standards for literary work mean this is a reading not to be missed.
To that end, over the past year I have tried to develop rough design guidelines for the Reading Series posters. The only required element for all posters is the “Kenyon Review Reading Series” badge in the lower righthand corner, but beyond that, I’ve settled on a handful of typefaces and stylistic choices to make the posters more coherent and consistent with each other.
For up-and-coming, experimental, or more explicitly political writers, a bolder style works well. Deep drop shadows, overlapping text and imagery, and more adventurous type treatments—with heavy use of Oswald and Butler—make for posters as dynamic as the writers they represent.
When high-quality photos are available, cutting out figures and overlaying them on text brings an engaging dimensionality to the posters.
Occasionally, custom illustration highlights a theme for the event. For Javier Zamora’s reading, which focused on immigration and Zamora’s status as an undocumented Salvadoran-American, I painted barbed wire, an image from his poem “Saguaros.” For the Resistance, Change, Survival panel, I drew inspiration from existing visuals for the panel—which featured a photo of a candlelight vigil—and painted a hand holding a candle aloft.
For established authors or events more closely associated with the Kenyon Review itself, I turn to a more traditional style. Along with Butler, Cormorant Garamond lends an elegant, historic quality to the posters.
For the Literary Festival poster, the layout and typography must be particularly precise in order to clearly convey the full schedule of events for the week.
