A print poster celebrating the first season of Digging for Idols is coming soon! Inspired by a combination of the trading card checklists often found in packs of sports cards, regional/school sports posters that show team schedules, and tour dates listed on performing artist merch, I designed a 17×22 inch print for DFI listeners old and new (see pdf at bottom of post).
It compiles the entire first season into a grid with episode titles, the Survivor players we covered, what we watched, and a column to check off the pods that the owner has listened to. It’s essentially a giant checklist. All of the design choices from there on were built around this intended utility. This wasn’t conceived as an eye catching bid to raise awareness and lure in new listeners. The intention is to deepen the relationship with existing listeners. Because of that, the poster doesn’t include a huge description of the show–outside of the short blurb near the top–as it is geared more toward people who have listened to at least one episode already.
As a result of that intention, the design started with the episode table and checklist itself. If I intended to hang this poster in coffee shops to promote the show, I would have taken a different approach, but since it has this very specific checklist theme, the table itself does contain smaller text that requires an assumed level of engagement. Anyone using it for its intended purpose would be able to read it just fine when printed, and for anyone not, the surrounding elements such as the logo, the images of the hosts and the Apple Podcasts quote, are larger and arranged along a guideline in the right third. I concede this is certainly an unconventional vision for a poster design–as I have never seen a poster-sized checklist full of podcast episodes before–but I’m willing to risk casual viewers’ confusion as the cost of building a more in-depth listening relationship with core fans of the show, with this particular design.
On a technical level, I executed the checklist using the table function in InDesign, softening the lines, adding a header row using the color scheme of the podcast, then filling out the cells with the appropriate information. Once set, I placed it along a left third guideline then built around it, dressing it with the logo and photos from podcast recordings to push the empty space outward.
Revisions from an earlier draft included breaking up images that were natively paired together, as they created the impression of inconsistencies with gutter sizes, raising the checklist and podcast logo up closer to the top of the design while remaining along that left guideline, reducing the size of the images to lessen clutter, and relocating the listener quote from the middle of the images to beneath them.
The designs accompanying the poster differ fundamentally in that they couldn’t possibly serve the same purpose as the larger format checklist poster. As a result, they feature a more “business card” like design with essential information about the show. They could serve as social headers or giveaway cards. It’s possible that my focus on the relatively higher-concept poster has left the peripheral designs with less “to do,” but the more the merrier and they can be stashed away for future use.
Subscribe to Digging for Idols on Spotify and Apple Podcasts then follow the show on Instagram to find out when the poster is made available to listeners!
Leave a Reply