Marian Bantjes fulfils a custom lettering job for Michael Bierut at Pentagram. This piece is one of a permanent collection in the Smithsonian’s Cooper Hewitt Design Museum. (Marian Bantjes, Seduction, 2006, web portfolio)

Upon seeing the poster, I immediately go to its title, Seduction, but the almost as immediate does my eye go to the point above it, it looks like a Y encircled. After deciding that the Y isn’t pertinent to the poster’s meaning, I take in Seduction’s branches and swirling lines and move downward. Seduction seems to function as a line that extends into a plane with it’s swirling extensions, most of which are up top, travel into Seduction, and pass through to the words below. These words are seen as lines rather than planes given that they help the eyes travel downward in reading the words.

The visual weight oh this piece is balanced. The swirling nature of the title and top half of the poster is balanced with the strong presence of the structured lines created by the wording on the bottom half. While it is indeed balanced, it’s not for symmetry but through the balancing of the asymmetrical elements.