P4 Documentation
Introduction
This project was a series of three fictional event posters, building on all the concepts we have learned thus far: Gestalt principles, color, hierarchy, use of typeface, etc. Additionally, we had to tie aspects of these posters together to make them a series. The goal was to create three posters that clearly belonged together in a series but also worked well as individual event posters.
Initial Sketches
My first sketches were extremely rudimentary. I wasn’t considering how easy or difficult the illustrations were but was rather just trying to explore very different ideas since I had never created an event poster before or paid very much attention to the ones around campus. Here, I struggled with having the posters invite someone to an event, rather than just having an illustration that represented the subject of the event.
Digital Iterations, Refinement, and Feedback
I began my digitizing by using the Pen tool to outline some of the illustrations that I was possibly going to use for the posters.
However, looking at these illustrations, I had no idea how to make these posters seem like an event series. The different orientations and sizes of these illustrations would require me to make very different poster layouts, while the illustrations had little in common with one another even though they might work well on separate posters.
I looked at my initial sketches and started thinking of other illustrations that might work. For the apple picking event, I liked the idea of having an illustration of a person picking an apple from a tree, but none of the images I found online gave off the feeling that I wanted for this event. But then, looking at the cider mug, I thought of how people usually hold warm drinks in the cold, with two hands, and that was where I got the idea to illustrate hands holding different things for each event. At this point I also had all of the type that I was going to put on each poster, so after using the Pen tool on these illustrations of each object being held, I put the type on. Varying the layout didn’t seem to work at all; it seemed to make the posters seem less like a series rather than more like a series, so for the interim critique, I kept it very uniform.
I had these black and white drafts done, but when I tried to add color, I ran into a problem. I couldn’t just select the paths and use the Fill tool to fill the objects with color. When I tried to do that, parts of the object were filled in, while other parts were still completely blank. The geometrically-shaped filled areas clued me in as to what was wrong — my strategy using the Pen tool. Instead of outlining entire areas that were supposed to be filled with the same color, I was making lines and not connecting endpoints together. I was forced to bring the black and white drafts to the critique, where the discussion let me know that I needed to vary the layout and add the name of the festival along with a logo.
After realizing my mistake, I decided to retrace my illustrations since the alternatives would take more time, and I needed to try out colors soon. At the next desk critique, I took the time to trace everything again. Brendon recommended I try out Adobe Kuler to explore color palettes. He also gave me the idea to rotate the illustration in the Apple Picking poster, advice that I took after retracing the hand.
I found many fall color palettes that inspired me. I now knew that I wanted a warm orange hue to set the mood and a red hue to represent the apples.
I created a simple logo by duplicating an illustration of an apple, shrinking one apple and rotating it as an overlay.
After adding colors to my posters, I showed my posters to my roommate, and he said that the posters were missing something — they seemed a bit empty. I took that to mean that I needed an additional illustration of some sort to tie the posters together. I immediately thought of a leaf, since falling leaves are strongly associated with Autumn. Showing the posters to him again, he agreed that this change made the posters more cohesive. I posted in the Feedback channel on Slack, and the comments were mainly that I was missing information, I needed to vary the colors and layouts a bit, and that I should change the color of my illustration outlines.
I disagreed with the missing information — I looked at the requirements and they did include a short paragraph about the event, but I decided that one tagline per event did count as a sort of “short paragraph” since it added information to each event but was also attention-grabbing in a way. I changed the colors very slightly and played with the layouts, following the feedback, and colored the traces in.
At this point, I thought that the type didn’t match the poster anymore since I had changed the feel of the illustrations so much. I emailed my posters to Brendon, and he sent me the Fontin typeface, as well as some specific comments such as suggestions for hierarchy and layout changes.
After sending this back to Brendon again, he sent me the San Serif version of Fontin just in case I wanted to use it, along with specific typographical comments such as leading and kerning. To make the typeface more cohesive, I went ahead and changed the default Myriad Pro.
Final Series
Reflection
Throughout this process, I completely forgot what we learned just a week ago about typography. I didn’t notice kerning or leading problems on my posters until Brendon pointed them out to me, and the typeface I chose in the beginning to represent the festival ended up not fitting the posters once I added color. Especially in the final critique, I saw very good examples of how color and typeface could be used to create a mood and really wrap up the posters in one cohesive series, even if the layouts of each individual poster were dramatically different. I thought that many of the event posters were successful even if they had exactly the same layouts, but it was definitely more interesting with different layouts since you could tell that the designer took more effort in crafting the colors and type to still make the posters look like they belonged in a series.
During the final critique, I thought that it was interesting how some people saw aspects of my posters much differently than I did. They saw the leaf illustration as swirling around, as if blowing in the wind, when I was trying to draw attention to certain areas and not focusing on movement. Additionally, my posters made people feel hungry since the hand illustrations seem to be offering food in each poster, while I thought of them as simply inviting. I was pleased that the “cozy Autumn” feel of the posters came through though, and it made me feel very happy as a designer when someone mentioned it.
Next time, I will focus more on creating a mood/feeling that comes from my designs, since I think that my priority is to make a connection with the person viewing the designs. I think that this is very difficult since I will have to use several aspects (color, type, illustration style, etc.) work together and balance each other, while still maintaining effective communication of information.
