Project 4: Poster Series Process Documentation

This project was really fun. I was able to base my design about something that I found really interesting. Making three posters was intimidating, especially since the pen tool can be pretty difficult to use. As time progressed, I found myself having an easier time with the pen tool and making some really nice looking work. My main priority of the series was to maintain a similar organizational structure between the three posters. I was able to do this effectively in my final product by keeping the three event names to be three words in length, by placing the information and imagery at similar locations on each poster and by maintaining an overall theme and art style

I think that one of the things that set my poster series apart from the others was this central theme that I had developed across my posters. I was able to do this by splitting the poster in half with one color on each side. I was then able to color my images in using the colors from the opposite sides. This made a really cool effect that worked well, especially since the colors used were those that represented the specific characters in the posters.

Another important aspect of my poster was the typeface. I ended up going with a typeface called “BigNoodleTitling”. It is one of the typefaces that is used by the video game that I took a lot of my inspiration from and I found that it worked really well in the poster series, especially at the top where I introduce the event itself. One of the problems with this typeface is that there are no lowercase characters. In the bottom left corner of my poster, I have a bit of text and it would have looked better if I had used a typeface that had lowercase capabilities, though I was afraid that any other typeface that I used would seem out of place so after a few attempts (Avenir, Helevetica, and Arial) I wasn’t sure what to do and felt that it was sufficient to leave the typeface how it was.

Maintaining the logo in the corner of all three posters was also an important feature of them. I was careful to incorporate the whole “two color” theme that I had developed when making the logo, which again, helped each of the posters to stand out.

The most difficult of the three posters in the series was the second one. It was different from the other two in that it was about an event involving two characters, not just one. For this reason, I had to consolidate space on the poster for two images — not just one, limiting what I could do with the “two color” theme I had developed for my series. I decided to color in the images of the characters monochromatically as it looked very good and was a good substitute for maintaining the theme involving the two colors. I was able to do the color switching thing that I had done in the other two posters with the V, which I had created with the pen tool with the fill on, creating two sharp triangles that approached each other.

One of the techniques that I ended up using the most in this project was reflecting an image. Since almost all of the things that I had created with pen tool were symmetrical, I realized that I only needed to create half of it, and then copy it and flip it across the Y-axis and align it properly. Doing this saved me a lot of time and helped to make everything look clean and also made the color switching effect easier (as the two halves were separate to begin with so coloring them separately was also easy).

Initial Sketches

My initial sketches didn’t end up being all that helpful. I explored a lot of options but misinterpreted exactly what we were supposed to do for the project when I created them. I thought that we were supposed to make three posters for a single event, not three posters for different events for a larger festival. Nonetheless, my initial sketches were able to provide me with good ideas, such as how to do the lettering, how to place the information on the poster, and how to maintain the idea that the three posters are a series. I explored many ideas but I ultimately began to gravitate towards my final design quickly, especially once I started to iterate digitally, I really liked how things were coming along and knew that my theme would make for a good series if executed well. One of my initial ideas with the sketches was to create a poster for three events with the same artist but in different cities, but I ultimately decided against this idea, though some of my (bad) sketches remain.

I need to work on my sketching in general. I don’t plan enough and because of that I end up making a lot of mistakes and ruining the sketch overall. At this stage, I tried to develop a grid, which I think can be seen well-executed in my final product.

Digital Iterations