“Daffodils” by William Wordsworth
Design by Melissa

The design of this broadside by Melissa brings a sense of playfulness and warmth to the poem by William Wordsworth. The poem is about a field of daffodils and the way the narrator remembers the daffodils as happy beings dancing in a never-ending field. The mood of the text is cheery, uplifting and reminiscent, in a sense that a grown person gains contentment when remembering a specific event.

The bright yellow color is representative of the yellow daffodils as well as being known as a “happy” color, which references the mood of the poem. The complementary blue color that Melissa is using for the title and her hand-made font makes the broadside colors intriguing. The blue may also be representative of the narrator commenting on his frame of mind right before seeing the daffodils, when he describes himself as, “wander[ing] lonely as a cloud” the blue looks like the hue of the sky on a sunny day.

The size of the print would work better if the body text were larger, bolder or in someway easier to read. When close up, the text is not very hard to read but seeing the same font in the same size, for multiple paragraphs can make people want to skip over portions of the poem. The visual hierarchy in order from most eye catching to least goes: title, author and then body. In theory the idea of using the hand generated font seems like a good idea, but because the font is so large in scale compared to the body, it detracts from the focus of the poem.

The body could visually relate to the title and author more if the large portion of text was a more playful and organic font. Although the display level text does relate to the text because the long stems look similar to the long thick stems of daffodils, using a readable yet youthful digital font may have united the body and headlines more. On the other hand, I could see that using a basic, serious font for the body working since the poem is about a grown person remembering pleasant past times. The poem is serious but happy and illustrating that contrast in textual juxtaposition would be kind of difficult if both fonts were playful.

The complementary colors attract my attention from a distance. The size of the title is a good size, so that even far away the playful font draws me in and makes me wonder what the poster is about. It was a good idea to place a darker yellow text box around the main body is helpful to create space within the broadside, but I think a larger size would be better and more engaging to onlookers. Leaving some negative space around the body of the text is also helpful to readers especially since there is a lot of small text used. The alignment of the text being on the left hand side while the body is positioned in the middle is visually interesting, but I wonder if it would be more eye catching keeping the text with the box on the left hand side. Keeping the original line breaks of the poem may have been important to preserve the original feeling of the poem, but offering viewers more space with tracking or leading may help readers to not be overwhelmed by the amount of text to read.