Poster Series Documentation
For this project, we were asked to make a poster series for three separate events in a single festival.
Poster Details
Initially, while coming up the events, I was not sure what event to do. I considered doing fashion shows, arts & craft workshops, food related topics, and a concert series. In the end, I decided to on a series of tea workshops because I thought that designing the posters would present some interesting challenges and forced me to think differently from the ways I normally do.
Festival Details:
Name: Infini-tea and Beyond
A series of tea-related workshops to help increase interest in tea and tea culture.
Dates: April 8th, 15th, and 22nd
Time: 2pm-5pm
Location: Lucky Cat Tea Shop
Cost: $10 per event (purchase online at luckycatteashop.com
Workshops:
- It’s always tea time: British Tea Culture
- 茶 Cha: The Origins of Tea and Chinese Tea Culture
- Tea Appreciation and Tea Blending
Sketches
For my first series, instead of having a common theme through all my posters, I wanted only focus on having a few small similarities to link the posters together. The grid layout would be the same on every poster, and the location of the details would also be in the same spot. However, the illustration on each page would be vastly different.
For the tea appreciation poster, I wanted the background to be like the shelves you often see in hipster coffee or tea shops.
For the second event, I just put the Chinese character for the word, “tea.” In comparison to my other two poster sketches, this one is rather plain.
Lastly, I was inspired by the quote from Alice in the Wonderland, so I sketched out the tea party scene from the book.
In retrospect, the themes across these three posters is not very well unified, so I never ended up making full versions of these posters. When I was sketching out my ideas, I wanted to pick earthy tone colors to give a vibe of calmness, but I came to realize that the tea party sketch in the British Tea Culture poster did not quite work out with the overall color scheme and feeling of the series. Furthermore, the plainness of the Chinese Tea Culture poster did not match the other two posters. Overall, because the sketches were not very cohesive, I did not continue to work with this series.
For the next poster series, I tried to go for a minimalistic look. To do so, I crunched the illustration and the text into one section and left the rest of the posters blank. The illustrations formed by the dots is supposed to scattered tea leaves. I thought that it would be fun to play around with having the shapes be tea leaves, and the text to be the white space inside the shapes. The box with the “x” through was supposed to be the logo. The backgrounds of each of the posters would be darker, more saturated colors, like so. The text would be white.
Unfortunately, this layout did not work out well. From the perspective of scale, the content was too small. I also had a very difficult time imitating the texture and feel of tea leaves in Illustrator, and the color of tea leaves did not stand out on the background. As a result, I also did not continue working with this series.
After spending sometime scrolling on Pinterest and thinking about the features of coffee and tea shops and cafes. I wanted to do a chalkboard inspired poster. Many cafes put up chalkboards with the daily specials out to promote their products, so I hoped to convey that setting.
Because I thought exploring chalkboard textures, fonts, and drawing styles would be challenging, I decided to do digital versions of my third poster series. To imitate chalk colors, I picked more pastel colors for my color palette.
Digital Iterations
To begin, I did some research to figure out how to make a chalkboard textured background. This required using 2 overlapping dark grey rectangles and a series a filters. Then, using a white watercolor brush at a very low opacity, I drew streaks across the chalkboard to imitate the dirty, erased effect.
Once the chalkboard texture was completed, I started to research about a variety of fonts that would work for my posters. This was very troublesome because the fonts had to be handwritten or feel handwritten but the fonts had to be readable. In addition, not all handwritten fonts suit the feel of a chalkboard. Below are some of the fonts that I experimented with.
After testing and pairing a variety of fonts, I decided on Handy George and Roskrift as a pairing. Then I spent some more time scrolling through Pinterest for some more inspiration, and decided to that it would be interesting to add banners into the illustrations. I drew the following three banner types:
In the process of drawing these, I played around with the different chalk, pencil, and charcoal brushes that Illustrator had.
Next, I began to place the text onto the posters and shifted the placements between the different posters to see the effect. I also experimented with the fills, feathering, and outlines of the different parts of the text to see if I could enhance the chalkboard feel.
For my first poster, I did the I tried to draw a Chinese style tea cup on my poster, but it did not turn out the way I wanted it to. Instead, I drew flowers onto the tea cup to add some color to the image. However, I realized that the mostly white text did not stand out enough, so I experimented with the colors of the banners and the text.
After I was generally satisfied with the way the first poster looked, I worked on the remaining posters. Because the banner I drew for the British Tea Culture poster was not centered, I decide to try turning the grid to side and made the text align to that.
Instead of following my original sketches, I decided that it would be more interesting to have a more British style teapot as the illustration instead. To do so, I looked up Victorian style tea pots and tried to the imitate the shape. Next, because the grid was already at an angle, I realized it would look better for the teapot to also be tilted at an angle. I readjusted the angle of the spout and added pouring. I picked blue and green for this poster because I felt that it suited the teapot and the tea coming from the spout.
For the last picture, I decided to draw tea bags and did this by referring to a picture of a tea bag. I chose a lavender color and a salmon-peach color for this poster. In retrospect, the shade of pink that I chose kind of clashes with the pink on the first poster.
Poster Drafts
Feedback & Iterations
After printing out my drafts, I realized that the colors and the brush storkes were not bright enough on the black background. Furthermore, the text, font weights, fonts, etc did not stand out enough. The text was also not large enough, so it does not pull people in well enough.
A few days before the final product was due, I had a discussion with Julia about the things that I could possibly do to improve the posters. She suggested that I could try using an ivory background, and the text and images could feel hand-drawn on paper instead of being on a chalkboard. Consequently, I decided to experiment and play around with my posters following her suggestions.
First, I changed the background to a paper color and tried to play around with the colors. After staring at my posters for a while, I realized that the fonts really did not stand out enough, so I went back to searching for different fonts and trying them out. Next, I decided to get rid of the banner. I did not give as much impact to the title in a meaningful way, even when I tried to change the thickness of the stroke.
I tried difference shades of a variety of watercolor textures to see what worked best. I also continued to experiment with the fonts before deciding on Aldi Slim and Gloss and Bloom. I think that the script font is bold enough to be readable at a distance, and the sans serif font is relatively readable. I also played around with the alignment of the text. In the add, I decided that it was best to keep the text centered for consistency and better adherence to the grid.
Then I played around with the colors. I was not a fan of the off-white background, so I decided to try have 3 primary colors, along with black, for my posters. I softened up the colors to better match the message and feel of the poster series. In each poster, one color would stand out a lot more than the other two. In comparison to my first drafts, I also tried to make the secondary text larger and changed the placement of content at the bottom of the page. I think that this helped clean up the hierarchy and made it more accessible to a viewer.
After some unsatisfactory experiments, I decided to use varying shades of the three primary colors: red, blue, and yellow. This ensured that the contrasts would be very obvious and that the color would work together as a unit.
The Chinese Tea Culture poster gave me quite a bit of trouble because I could not get the title to be ordered in a way without being cluttered. After trying a variety of things, I decided that it would be best to place the “infinitea & beyond presents” at the bottom of the poster rather than at the top. This made the information much more readable and straightforward.
Between all event information, I changed the black dividers into a color to bring more separation to the text and add more of the accent colors.
On this poster, I also made a lot of changes to the placement of a lot of the text. For example, I tried changing “hosted @ the lucky cat tea shop” to “workshop hosted @ the lucky cat tea shop,” but I felt that the extra word was not necessary. I also attempted to make that line in each poster another color other than black. However, on some of the posters, the text did not show up very well. (Ex. pink on blue, yellow on pink, etc) As a result, I kept the phrase in black. I also shifted the location of the information on this poster all over the poster before deciding to place it directly below the title.
I asked a friend for some feed and she noted that the illustrations did not standout enough. Initially, I turned the illustration back to black, but the colorfulness was lost with this change. As a result, I began to modify my color palette just a bit to see how I could make the drawings as well as the posters pop out more.
Likewise with this poster, I had some trouble deciding how to organize the content. Instead of keeping the event information at the bottom center, I moved it off to the side a bit. As for the “infinitea & beyond” blurb, I decide to move it to the top instead of leaving it above the title as I did in my first drafts. Then, I proceed to shrink the size of the text, so that it would fit nicely in the upper left hand corner. On this poster, I realized that blue was not standing out enough on the yellow. As a result, I increased the intensity of some of the colors and changed the shade of yellow that I was using.
Lastly, in every poster, I changed the brush stroke and weight of the stroke to make it more visible at a distance.
Final Product
For the most part, I pretty satisfied with my posters. It was very fun to work with the pen tool, brushes, and textures in Illustrator, and I think that I was able to gain a lot of insight by working with both text and images in a single project. However, if I had more time, I think that would try to clean up the hierarchy in some of the posters (yellow and pink). I think that the placement of the smaller text in the posters could provide better clarity. I also think that the shade of yellow I chose feels a little too green. It may be because blue images are on top of it. There is also a slight error in the information. The dates should be April 8th, 15th, and 22nd, but I did not catch this error. Overall, I really enjoyed working on this series as it allowed to experiment with a lot of new things.
