The process for creating this was a long one. It involved a lot of changes and a lot of layers. The program I used was Adobe Photoshop CS2. I changed the idea a little bit from my original proposal which was a poster for a music and dinner night at the hangar. The difference was the final draft was solely for a music concert. I kept the same target audience though and the idea for the general style having a "gritty truth" tone to it stayed the same.
The first thing I did was create the background. i did this by creating a new transparent layer, filling it white, and fiddling around with the "Texturizer" filter until I got it looking how I wanted.
The next step was to add the title (Urbana Desert). I actually went with the first font I picked out at random. I liked the "fancy" look it had. Next I chose the font for the "who/what/where" text. I wanted it to look like a basic/generic type font to contrast the fancy title look. Next I added the background text and chose a handwriting font to make it look like they were written on the poster by hand. The idea behind this background text is that each of these bands will be playing at the concert with Urbana Desert being the headlining act.
Next I added the drums. I found a picture of a drumset on good and added a series of filters in to it in photoshop and pasted as a new layer into my project. I sized it to fit decently in the middle, between the two sections of text.
Something was still missing, I felt like their was too much empty whitespace. i thought for awhile and came up with the idea of adding verticle lines with random spaced randomely across the poster.
I messed around with a few border ideas but in the end of this session decided that it looked better without a border. Here is what I had so far at this point (still hadn't added color)
Continuing on I decided I needed to add some life to it (even though I personally really like black and white) so I jumped onto colorsontheweb.com and chose a green-based color scheme.
I incorporated this into the existing work by changing the color of the already written text and changing the white background to green with the bucket tool and adjusting the opacity to lighten it up.
I spiced up the text effects a bit also by adding different layer styles to the urbana desert and the black text. I messed around with the settings of these layer styles for a long time until i got them how I looked.
To create the border I simply created a new transparent layer and freehanded the border with the paintbrush using a green color. I copied/pasted the border style from the urbana desert text layer to the handpainted border, and made a few adjustments until I got it how I liked. At this point I turned in the assignment as a rough draft and thought about what else I could add to it to finish it off.
I decided it still needed some white-space attention and wondered why drums were the only instrument being shown on the poster so I added the guitar necks you can see coming up from the bottom. I did this by finding a few guitar pictures on the net and editing them heavily with photoshop. I pasted these new, low-opacity images as new layers to my project and aligned them accordingly.
I thought about adding a time to the poster to make it more realistic but decided against it because it would take away from the humor and it isnt real anyway. The humor behind the poster is this: A Juneau band would never headline an event for the well-known the bands I have subtly listed in the background. The "Gold Street Church" actually burned down a year ago (not really called gold street church but it was on gold street in juneau). And the concert is listed on April Fools Day. I thought adding a time would take away from the humor of the poster so i left it off. If it was actually a real event I would definitely include the time.
I tried to focus on hierarchy, unity, and proximity.
The hierarchy comes into play with the different types of text used in the poster. There is the headlining event, Urbana Desert, with big, bold, fancy font that overpowers the rest.. then we have the lesser fonts- the bands in the background and the generic who.what.when text. I believe it does the job of showing you what is the most/least important of the texts.
Next is proximity. I tried to place things in a way that lead you from this to that, with the most important being first. I also tried to balance the whitespace so that there wasn't a lot of it in one spot. By adding the drums and the guitars i think i filled out some of the empty whitespace while connecting the top and the bottom portions of the text together. I think the drums lead you down the page. The vertical lines also help your eyes go from top to bottom while filling some of the empty whitespace.
Overall i tried to create a gritty, down-to-earth feel, while still preserving some artistic style. I went for a simple design and tried to match the color with the style: Here is my final draft:
