Symposium Identity Building Means Lots and Lots of Tiny Changes
After getting most of my content loaded into the templates last week, a lot of my work this week was tiny changes.
This week my work focused mostly on adjusting and refining the ideas I had put forth last week. Instead of a black and white composition, I’ve moved forward with some shades of gray and blue and orange spot colors for contrast.
I am not entirely sure about the overarching color palette overall and think the colors may need to be tweaked, but I like the overall effect and contrast so I decided to move forward with those for now.
Poster
A spent a lot of time, probably too much time, trying to nail down the exact look of this poster. For me getting one of my pieces in solid shape would hold the key to everything else and help me define rules for the use of spot color and line work.
Since so much of my work focused on setting small pieces in place, I, unfortunately, didn’t take as many progress shots as I have in the past. Some of the things I worked on though included:
- Changed my grid to give me more of a margin and then proceeded to realign all the text.
- Adding AM/PM to the timings to better define what they were and aligned the body copy to correspond with the base of the type.
- Better defining the symposium name: tweaking the tracking and kerning for better alignment. I brought the word invisible to the front and sent designs to the back in an attempt to play with the concept a little bit.
- Rethinking my date and location presentation to be more readable and employing some spot color.
- I started playing with linework for the poster, a theme that I am hoping will carry through to the rest of the work even if the lines have to be drawn individually for each surface.
- Reduced the size of the purchase information.
- Finally, I replaced the QR code with one that better fit the color scheme via this site.
The pen tool is both my favorite thing at the moment and my nemesis. While I understand how it works, trying to keep all the lines as paths I can manipulate if I change anything else is proving to be a problem. I played with the contrast of the lines too and settled on moving to low contrast gray against the background. My hope with this design is that it helps the eye move around the piece.
Layout
I did a little less work on this one this week, but I am confident where I am going. I located a photo of Marjane Satrapi from this website and proceeded to remove the background. I then found another image from her graphic novel to set behind it.
I am aware that I haven’t removed all the bits of the background but I wanted to see how the elements looked before I spent hours painstakingly deleting pixels.
I then redistributed the color from my poster around the layout. I found some layouts from the mood board I constructed that used a very subtle line in the back of the text to add some visual interest so I attempted to duplicate that.
What I have learned though, is that the InDesign pen and pencil tool are not my friends. The InDesign pen tool only draws in angles, and the pencil tool does not give me smooth curves. I posted the results here, but I plan to remake the artwork and the lines in Illustrator later this week to put the poster and the layout to bed.
I also intend to create some vectors of quotation marks and to put those behind my pullout quotes. I was attempting to text wrap them but I need to either investigate the matter further or I need to figure out how to exclude elements from the text wrap guidelines.
Website
I laid out my website in Illustrator last week and intended to translate it to Figma this week. Figma has proven to be a bit of a learning curve, not in terms of how, but where things are. After going between three Adobe products it’s a bit of a learning curve to move to Figma.
I did learn how to layout a document grid and have made a few components to ultimately make the job easier. However, this layout is currently still black and white.
In most cases, I would worry about this, but given that I feel like my poster and my spreads are looking more at technical issues at the moment I feel that I can spend a lot more time giving this the same attention I gave those components last week and be in good shape.
I’m probably going to continue to work on this into the night or right before class in the morning so I expect it to look a little different.
