New Project: Event Poster Design

Hello Students, 

Your new assignment is to design an event poster for a musical group. You must adhere to the specifications below and use your own creativity to design an eye catching and original poster design. This is your chance to flex your creative and design skills. All elements studied are to be utilized and will be scrutinized: color, design, illustration and typography.

Poster design by your instructor, Seth Wilson

Event Poster Design Project:

- You MUST produce 1 FULL PAGE pencil sketch of your poster design idea

- Your poster must be designed at 18"X24" at 300DPI if you are using Photoshop

- Your poster must contain ORIGINAL ARTWORK or ORIGINAL PHOTOGRAPHY. You can use found images as reference only, but direct artwork tracing or photography used in your project must be original. Time to bust out your camera's!!!

- You may use Photoshop or Illustrator or both... your choice

- You may use no more than 2 fonts

- You must choose 2 bands/musical acts/artists to include in your poster, one group is the headline act, the other is the opening act

- Your poster must contain the following elements:

   • Band #1

   • Band #2 Opening Act

   • Location (the venue, such as The Catalyst or The Greek, Shoreline, etc...)

   • Date of the show

   • Show Times

   • Ticket Price

   • Ages Admitted

- When you post your final work to your blog you must display the color palette used, list all fonts used, what software and hardware was used, including the camera

TIPS, TRICKS AND RESOURCES FOR POSTER DESIGN

• Designing a poster isn't always easy, especially if it is your first time. Don't be afraid to experiment and don't feel held back by your drawing capabilities. There are lots of tricks to creating original artwork from photographs that don't require elite artistic techniques.
• Pay attention to the spaces BETWEEN your letters. Take some lessons from our typography studies and pay attention to the spacing, pace and rythmn of the words.
• Use colors that COMPLIMENT each other. When your color choices clash it affects the entire composition of your design.
• Communicate your message with the right images. Poster design is about communicating and delivering information. Your design should fit the style of music that the poster is advertising, pay attention to what will speak to your intended audience best.

Links for inspiration:

Link - Creative Event Poster Design Samples

Link - 30 Inspiring Poster Designs

Link - Vintage Poster Designs for Color Inspiration

Examples of student work:

New Project: Creating an Identity Package

Hello Students,

An identity package is a corporate communication standard. It helps a company or organization present a uniform appearance to the world in its correspondence and communication. Being able to design a logo and then enhance it for an ID package is a strong design skill and one that is readily marketable to your potential clients.

Identity Package Assignment Details:

• When your final logo design is complete, create an identity package that expands on your logo design style and color usage. Look for elements you can play with, refer too or borrow from in the design of your identity package assets.
• Create a business card, letterhead, envelope design and CD Label. Use Indesign or Illustrator for creation of these assets but you can create your final ID package mockup with Photoshop.

Tutorial:

Use this tutorial as a guide to creating your Business card, letterhead and envelope. You will have to do some research and use your imagination. Look up the sizing and specifications of each asset before creating them, for instance the CD label, you can find a template to use through a quick google image search.

Link: How to create an identity package

Resources:

• Link: ID Package design done right
• Link: ID Package design samples

Examples of student work:

Have fun!

- Mr.W

Final Logo Development

Hello Students,

In this project you will take your strongest example of your previous logo design exercise (5 styles, 15 examples) and create a final logo design.

Final Logo Development Project:

• Take the strongest example of your previous project and develop it further, explore it's design. Create 3 strong pencil sketches of your final design, explore layout and graphic options, choose the best and render it as vector art
• You should work independently on this exercise and ask for help when needed or research your own answers online.
• You should work quietly but are encouraged to ask questions and share information.
• You must render your pencil sketched logo with Adobe Illustrator to create vector artwork as the final result.
• You will create a version in black and white and color.

Vector Artwork Part 1:

1. Use a flatbed scanner to scan your pencil sketch artwork at a resolution of 300 DPI and save it to your computer in the JPG file format. If no scanner is available, use a high quality (or whatever is available) digital camera to take a picture of the design. Use a steady hand and make sure the camera is facing the artwork straight on. Then copy the photo to your computer.
2. Open a New Document in Adobe Illustrator and set it to Letter size, 8 1/2 inches by 11 inches, set the orientation to match your logo sketch paper, set the color to CMYK.
3. Bring the JPG file of your sketch into Illustrator by going to the File Menu and selecting Place, navigate to your image and click to place.
4. Scale the image if needed to fit within your page boundaries.
5. Save your document into a new project folder and title it " logo_version1.ai".

Vector Artwork Part 2:

1. Open the Layer Palette and set the opacity of the Pencil Sketch Layer to 75% and lock the layer.
2. Create a New Layer by clicking the New Layer button on the Layer Palette, rename it "black and white art".
3. Trace the line art of the pencil sketch with the Pen Tool, make sure all the curves are smooth and all the shapes complete. When complete modify the shape of the line with a custom brush or the Stroke Shape option in the Stroke Palette. Make every line graceful and precise.
4. When the outlines are complete fill in areas with black to create the black and white version.
5. When the B&W version is done, create a copy of that layer and rename it "color art". Edit that layer to become your color version. Use all the colors you want to see in the final version, gradients are allowed, choose your color palette wisely.
6. Pay attention to retaining quality line shape, good use of contrast and bright appropriate color usage.

Student Examples:

Low Performing

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Medium Performing

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High Performing

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