Altiro "Solid tent companions" street poster

Summary

A single portrait poster wheatpasted onto a concrete wall, built from a full-bleed work photograph with acid yellow type laid over its lighter upper half.

Visual description

The poster sits centered on a grey concrete panel wall, with out of focus green foliage intruding at the left edge and its paper visibly rippled and creased from pasting. The image beneath is a photograph shot from inside a part-raised tent: pale canvas fills the top two thirds, and along the lower third a crew of five in dark work clothes push a long wooden pole upward, standing on a timber deck with trees and reeds behind them. Type sits in the pale canvas area in acid yellow: "SOLID TENT" in letterspaced all-caps serif, then "companions" much larger in a flowing serif italic directly below. The circular monogram sits centered under the words, and "ALTIRO.BE" runs small and letterspaced at the very bottom of the poster. All type is centered on a single axis.

Key takeaway

Setting the type in the empty canvas of the photograph rather than in a panel means the image and the message occupy the same space with no box. The all-caps serif over a large italic gives two very different voices from one type family and does the entire hierarchy in two lines.

Reuse notes

Good reference for out-of-home work where the product is a physical structure and the crew is the story. Depends on a photograph with a large clean area at the top for type, so it needs art direction at the shoot rather than a rescue in layout. The yellow only holds against the muted photograph; on a bright image it would disappear.