Designing a Poster for an Event
The finished product.
https://www.flickr.com/photos/131114161@N02/17322563712/
My first challenge with this project was coming up with creative yet realistic subject matter. Initially, I had imagined an event for which to make a poster, but I couldn't get the design focused or even very professional looking. It then occurred to me that I could simply create a poster for a future event. As a resident of Keenan Hall, one of the most important events of the year is the Kennan Revue, an annual sketch comedy show. In recent years, posters have been simple and informative, and I decided to continue that trend with my hypothetical poster for next year's show.
Once I had my design ideas straight, I began to produce the poster. I started with a base image from Flickr and added the text on top of that. The background image was mostly dark, but the text overlapped with some light areas which made it difficult to read. To combat this, I chopped up the background a little bit and added a black bar at the bottom to highlight the details of the event. To further improve the readability, a threw down a couple adjustment layers and filters on the background image. This included a brightness/ contrast adjustment and a blur.
The final step was creating and including the laughing head icon. I started with an original photograph of Mr. Clark and brought it into Photoshop. This was when I learned about the quick selection tool, which allowed me to crop out the background much more quickly and accurately than I could have done with the lasso tool. Once I had the head isolated, I played with curves and the pencil tool until I was left with a silhouette. Finally, I needed to smooth out the rough edges from the selection. Once this was done, I brought the silhouette into my poster, positioned it, and the work was done.
As someone who has definitely spent more time in GIMP than Photoshop, this project definitely helped me become more comfortable in the PS environment; knowing where the tools are, which windows show what, which specialty tools were made to complete which specific task, etc. If I had to come back and revise the project, there are two things on which I would work. The first would be to further refine the silhouette. I might try to bring it into Illustrator and use the trace tool to convert the image into vectors. This would fix the somewhat pixelated border. The other thing I would do is spend more time searching for an appropriate typeface. I like the one I used, but my search was very quick, and I think going deeper could have revealed an even better style.
A screenshot of my workspace.