Poster Series Final Documentation

Andrew Jaung

Initial Sketches:

For my series poster project, I chose to do a food tasting event with a wine, cheese and meats booth.

My three ideas are as followed:

1. Stupid simple very core image of the poster subject (wine, cheese, meat) with the description underneath and the event logo at the top right. This was similar to the Star Wars posters that we saw in class as an example.
2. I tried to somehow draw the image of a wine bottle, cheese and meat using the word itself. Other than wine, it seems too complicated to figure out how to draw meat or cheese with the respective words.
3. I like this idea the best. I wanted wine to show a bottle pouring in the glass with the logo on the bottle. I wanted the cheese and meats to be on plates like you see at restaurants for appetizers or at dinner parties. I might change the placement of the logos on these and move them to wrappers of the cheese and meat. I might play around with the location of the description to not make the posters exactly the same in layout.

First Drafts:

Unfortunately, having a slow computer with limited RAM, illustrator ended up crashing before I had a chance to save my initial designs. I ended up following through with my third design sketch for each poster. They all had white backgrounds to start. Because illustrator crashed, I got kind of disheartened and left the project alone for a few days.

I ended up choosing the following color palette for my project to go with my theme of wine, meat, and cheese tasting.

First Color Palette Used for First Crit

I also changed the design of the wine image from just wine pouring from a bottle to wine spilling from grapes. I removed the logos from the images themselves and moved it to the top left. The logo also went through several iterations which is shown below.

Left: design change for the wine and overall layout change, Right: Iterations of the logo

The first iteration of posters turned out as so:

Iteration 1 (technically 2, since the first one was lost by accident)

Class Crit 1:

This class really helped me figure out what I needed to work on. As you can see, each poster has a sort of gradient effect. I stumbled upon that tool by accident while playing around with illustrator during the work day class period before the crit. I really liked the effect so I decided to use it.

During class, we all used post-it notes to individually express our thoughts on each other’s works. What follows are the comments on my posters:

Comments on my posters

I will summarize generally what they say broken into pros and cons:

Pros:

• The colors definitely relate to one another, tying the series together
• The graphics are straightforward and make sense
• The logo that I came up with is pretty cool

Cons:

• The gradient seems to distract people from the main aspects of the posters and is out of place
• There was no description for the event or any information at all
• Watch out for pixelation in my images

Taking this advice, I wanted to simplify my color palette and really refine my images. I ended up searching for tutorials online on how to draw detailed wine glasses and meat. I found a couple links and tried to follow them in our last in class work period. The links are as follows:

For wine:

How to Make Wine Glass With Adobe Illustrator - Petshopbox Studio

For the grapes:

How to Illustrate Deliciously Realistic Grapes using Simple Techniques

To trace using the pen tool for the meat:

Charcuterie Imágenes pagas y sin cargo, y vectores en stock | Shutterstock

Final Iterations:

I ended up trying and failing at the wine and grapes which turned me to a new idea. I decided to make the images stupid simple and easily recognizable by everyone. I also wanted to simplify the colors and make them relate to the respective posters: (red for wine, yellow for cheese, pinkish for meat).

I liked the idea of the black bar/background I drew up while trying to change the design of the wine poster above and incorporated that into all three posters. This helped strengthen the hierarchy of the text. I used similar darker shades for each of the three posters to keep the theme of series.

I refined my images to keep them super simple and ended up shading them in black with a white stroke to make them stand out, adding pop and power to the posters. I finally added a description and event details in each, keeping the layout similar between the posters, yet not the same. My final posters ended up looking as follows:

Final iterations of my poster

As you can see, the final iterations are much simpler, and more refined. I tried to focus on the hierarchy between the different areas of text and the images. I tried to follow the 50–5–5 rule. The black image against a strong background color draws you in from 50 feet, the contrasting white event text at the bottom against the black background is the next thing you see at 5 feet away, and the event time and description and time/location details is for those 5 inches away with an emphasis on the date and location.

Final Crit Comments:

This is the iteration I showed during the final crit. People agreed that there was a clear improvement in terms of quality and thoroughness in this iteration. What follows are some of the comments that I remember from the crit, again broken into pros and cons:

Pros:

• Definitely more refined
• Much more simple and straightforward, yet seems more sophisticated than the last iteration
• Color palette is not as overwhelming
• Good hierarchy between the event name, date/location, and description
• At first glance, one can definitely tell that these posters belong in a series

Cons:

• The black used in the images turns people away from the fact that this is a food and wine festival (who wants burnt food)
• The title at the bottom could have more hierarchy within itself: “Jaung International Presents” could be smaller, putting more emphasis on the actual event title.
• Unsure why the wine poster has the description on the left and the date/location information on the right as opposed to the reverse on the other two posters

After crit review:

Overall, I think my progress through this project was very good. Though I didn’t seem to have as much breadth in my posters, I think the amount of depth and refinement makes up for it. Looking back, I definitely think my first (second) digital iteration was trash compared to my final. This project definitely had me thinking about everything we have learned in this class: hierarchy, color, grid, and typography, along with others.

I put a lot of effort into my final design and I think it went very well. This was very difficult for me since I am not a designer. I am a mechanical engineer, where we use already formulated equations and steps rather than in design where we are given nothing to start with and must design something out of nothing. I’m looking forward to the book project where I can be even more creative.