Introduction
The poster series project will further explore the concepts of hierarchy, typography, and color. The goal is to create an advertisement for the Summer Fridays at the Frick event in Pittsburgh, PA in a way that highlights our ability to create emotion using typographic voice and gestalt principles to effectively communicate the event details. I will also continue developing my Adobe Illustrator skillset by using new features I have not use before such as the pen tool and layers. By the end of this project, I hope to learn how to effectively communicate for events and delve deeper into the design process that gets me to that point.
Concept Design
Summer Fridays at the Frick is an annual event that is hosted every year in the city of Pittsburgh. The types of events held there are family friendly and designed to bring together the Pittsburgh community. There are music events, sunset watching, dance parties, and food! Given this information, I set out to create a poster that highlights these aspect of the event through illustration and color while also conveying the necessary event details.
I first created two mood boards in order to encapsulate the general idea behind my work. As it is located in the city of Pittsburgh, I wanted to incorporate bridges in my posters as a symbolic representtion of the city. It is also held during the summer and on Friday nights which is why I want to add the sunset to my poster as well. In Figure 1b, note that I include a map as well as landscape such as trees and rivers. Because this poster will be illustrated by me, I created this second mood board to better capture the limits of my poster design. I also want to ensure that the family friendly aspect of the poster shows out too which is why I included a picture of a family. I may actually consider building my whole poster around that idea instead in order to really bring out the emotional part of the event.
Above you will find a few initial thumbnail sketches for how I envision this board looking. I am not the best at drawing, so I focused primarily on the hierarchy of the poster. I really tried to stretch what is possible in hierarchy by coming up with a variety of different layouts in order to convey the information in a creative and easy to understand way. After sharing with my professor, we decided the first two thumbnails are the easiest to read so I will probably start digitizing them to see how they look. The bottom two are all over the place and may create some confusion when the reader starts looking at them. However, there are some positive aspects to these poster design such as the illustrations or the shapes of the text. These could be useful components when I start digitizing. I will definitely explore portrait and landscape designs because they both have their benefits.
Exercises
As we continue to learn how to use illustrator, this next project will require the use of two new tools. The first is the pen tool and the second is the pathfinder tool.
For the first exercise, we were tasked with outlining an animal using the pen tool. This required the use of anchors and multiple points in order to develop the best outline for the penguin. Figure 3a shows the final result
For the pathfinder exercise, it was really important that we determine the difference between the four options: unite, minus from front, intersect, and exclude. This required a lot of trial and error but ultimately worked out.
Digitization: Part I
Starting out with my initial thumbnail sketches, I quickly realized which hierarchy structures would work better once I transitioned to illustrator.
The first design was going to place all the text along the left side of the poster and use the right side for illustrations. The second design took a more central approach. One of my main focal points in creating this poster was bringing out the marketing aspect and I felt the second version worked more in my favor from that aspect so I continued fleshing that design out.
One of the big things for me in creating this poster was picking the right font. I spent time researching summer fonts and pulling fonts from the adobe cloud that I thought might make my poster stick out. I ended up settling on Beloved Script and Gill Sans. These two fonts compliment each other nicely.
Next, I started experimenting with the color scheme and determine which colors would work best for this poster. Originally, I wanted to use green in my poster and add some element of a park and nature, but in my exploration, I realized the direction I was going wouldn’t have space for a park. I decided blue and yellow would work quite nicely. The yellow in part because of Pittsburgh, but also because it’s representative of a sunset and blue for the sky. Creating a gradient was a new experience for me. I learned how to use lines in order to direct the light accordingly. It ended up working out quite well.
I learned how to use layers in order to separate my workspace into sections which allowed me to set the background, text, and illustrations on three different layers without interference from the others. This was a very useful tool.
Lastly, I added pictures. So, far I have an outline of the frick museum as well as a bridge to represent pittsburgh. In my original mood board, I was planning on adding trees to my poster. I abandoned this idea due to color restraints although I may revisit it if I get some feedback that suggests otherwise. I am still in the process of building out the illustrations for this poster, but I think it is overall coming along quite nicely.
Final Critique
Class
The final critique came with a lot of useful feedback for my poster. Most people enjoyed my gradient and color selection. However, some of the main feedback was that the information listed on my poster was too small, namely the title, date, location, and time. Also, the different color selection between the location and the address should not be there too. The class enjoyed the fonts and the use of whitespace in my poster as well.
Instructor
In class, I was able to meet with my professor to go over ways to improve the overall concept. Some of the things she suggested included adding an illustration of the frick museum and changing the color of yellow to a brighter one. She also recommended I move some of my text up in the poster and make it less central. After the final critique, I got much more in-depth feedback seen in Figure 5b. By increasing the font size and aligning my extra information with the space below, I am able to get more information across to my reader and increase the effectiveness of my poster.
Final Design Implementation
For my final implementation, I was able to create a much for effective poster by incorporating the feedback from my classmates and instructor. By increasing the font size for the title, date, and time it definitely forces the reader to pick up on that information. I also changed the color of the paragraph and free admission text to the blue from the top of the page to add more continuity throughout the poster. Lastly, I made the illustrations at the bottom bigger to fill more of the whitespace. I think this is effective because it fills more of the whitespace that would otherwise be empty causing some tension around the bottom.
Conclusion
This poster project pushed me out of my comfort zone. As a student org. leader, I have been tasked with making posters for a few years now but this is the first time I have ever built one from scratch. I learned about the process more than anything else. Coming up with a mood board, building out different versions, choosing colors, and ultimately making it all come together. I now have a much better understanding of what it takes to make an effective advertising poster. I also learned a lot about illustrator. The more I work with the application, the more I learn. I learned how to work on two or more posters simultaneously, rasterize objects, blend color palettes, draw, import fonts, and build a gradient from scratch. Moving forward, I feel confident in my ability to create posters from scratch and advertise effectively. I look forward to applying my new skills and knowledge to final project of this semester.
