Project 4 — Promotional Communication Series

For this project, we are working on creating a series of posters focused on the Summer Fridays at The Frick, which is 10 weekly events happening on the front lawn of the Frick. For this project, I’m excited to use Illustrator to illustrate. Although I have used illustrator’s pen tool and shapes before, I haven’t attempted to create full vector art using Illustrator. My digital art experience in the past has mainly been pixel based, this is an area I’m hoping to grow a lot in.

Moodboard

I began the moodboard just by looking into summer aesthetics and figuring out the type of colors I would want to be using. I then looked a bit at lawn parties, picnics, outdoor gatherings, and camping to see the types of poster design I was leaning towards.

For the Facebook event, I was leaning towards something with a strong silhouette that I could use, like swing dancing or a music group.

Exercises:

Pen

For my pen tool exercise, I had some experience since I am used to using it in Photoshop in the past. I decided to try to pen out both the blacks and the white to get practice working in small areas and with details.

Pathfinder

I also have experience with the pathfinder from other projects. I mostly just used the minus front tool to cut out the parts.

First Drafts and Testing

For my thumbnails, I went on Google Maps Satellite and tried to get screenshots of areas in The Frick that looked interesting. The main areas were the Frick Clayton, the house that the Fricks lived in, the main entrance, and some of the museums with interesting architecture. I also got some pictures of the overhead view to see if there was an interesting way to use it.

From this, I tried to generate some poster concepts and where the elements of the poster would be. I also considered a map design where the locations of the events would be highlighted.

For the event, I’m not sure if I want to stick to swing dancing. I think the silhouette idea still looks good over one of the backdrops mentioned earlier. Other than that, I’ve considered different levels of zoom to focus more on the event vs the atmosphere.

Color Scheme

For my color scheme, I’m deciding between the summery colors of the top, or the night theme of the bottom. Both will feature majorly cool colors with the blues and greens, with accents of yellow and orange.

First Attempt At Illustration:

This was created very roughly using the pen tool to get an idea of what the illustration would look like, but I’m having trouble figuring out how to use the colors effectively to create compelling illustrations

First Iterations

From the first iteration, I tried to illustrate The Frick Clayton using the darker blue-orange color scheme.

From the first critique, I received feedback to consider squaring up my textboxes, consider using orange hues in the road and silhouettes, and make the building larger.

Iteration 2

First, I tried to create a blend gradient from black to the hue to white to see the different values I could use.

I used it to create the facebook banner and made some edits on the main poster using the feedback.

Iteration 3

For this next iteration, I used the comments from critique as a basis. I think the biggest issues are the placement of the text, with the main poster’s small text being too large and taking up too much space.

I moved the text around the poster to create a stronger informational hierarchy by separating the date and location.

I also played with the gradients to create a glow around the house that goes to black around the title.

The Facebook banner also doesn’t need the description, so we can remove a lot of the cluttering text and edited the colors to have a glow emanating from the center of the page.

Final Iteration

For the final iteration, I was pretty happy with the main poster’s content, I just changed the alignment of a few items to improve the flow of the text. For the Facebook banner, I ended up starting over from scratch because I didn’t think the concept was working.

I reused the building from the main poster, but changed up the gradients to reflect the lighting, and tried to make the focus be on the silhouetted shapes.

Reflection and Conclusion

I’m really happy with the way this project turned out. I think the illustration that I’ve done with the Frick Clayton building works really well, and I’ve managed to incorporate it into both designs in a compelling way.

I think I’ve learnt a lot about using Illustrator to combine reference images into illustrations through the pen tool. However, I think I could have explored what I could have done with illustrations a lot more. Although I think this looks really good, the concept is just a building with silhouettes, which I wouldn’t consider the strongest or most appealing.

Overall, I’m proud of what I’ve accomplished in this poster but I wish I had explored a bit more in the journey.