Can You Judge a Writers Festival By Its Poster?

The last time I saw a bus shelter used for literary purposes (the Poetry in Transit program), you could barely see the poem for the program. It was an awful design, with the poem's left margin butted up against information that, along with the host organization, could have been in much smaller type and at bottom. Why can't we have the poem on a surface with an A4 ratio and nothing else around it, but at bottom?

This year's Vancouver Writer' Fest (formerly the Vancouver International Writers and Readers Festival) has not benefited from a shortening of its name -- for all the folky illustrations squeezed in and around it. Yes, it's clear the VWF has been tasked with promoting that parking problem known as the Granville Island Public Market, a federal project that, in 1973, marked the closure of a vender-run and probably illegal public market that opened organically around Ballantyne Pier a couple years before it, but the overall design of its poster is so cluttered as to lose any sense of dimension, the "brand" (the festival) rendered in different fonts, with "Writers" in italics no less (ugh).

As depressing as they are, posters like these tend to ignite my imagination, the trauma fantasy that has me a fly on the wall at the non-profit's design meeting, where the design team sits with taped on faces  listening to the sound of falling quarters, everybody getting their two-bits in. This is not a critique of inclusion, but a failure of leadership. The Vancouver Writers Fest would do well to hire the creative team that brought back the PNE all those years ago. It would be funding well spent.