Sawdust Festival: About this design:
My primary goal was designing an image that would appeal to an artistic audience, while also using a color scheme similar to what I found on the Sawdust Festival website. Since the Sawdust website used soft colors and a watercolor header on each page, I wanted to keep the colors on my design soft and use watercolor highlights. I felt that the watercolor image of a woman by Lorraine Adler, a featured artist on the Sawdust website, added the perfect amount of contrast and artistry to my poster with its bold colors and lines.
The page alignment is simple with a header and footer containing the essential festival time and location information, with two blocks in the center of the page for text and the image. Because this alignment was so basic, however, I decided to make it more interesting by using the pen tool to shape the text around the image. This not only highlighted the image as the central element of the design, but also allowed me to better make use of the white space on the page. The extra space allowed me to space out lines of text using leading, and place breaks at natural intervals in the text, which increased the readability and visibility of the overall poster.
The text coloring and increased size are repeated in the header and footer to create a relationship between these two pieces of text and to indicate that they are of greater importance than the secondary text. The proximity of the text, located in the same position on opposite ends of the page, further highlight the relationship between them. Also, since watercolors are central to both the Sawdust site and my poster, I decided to create to partially transparent and opaque watercolor image to further make the header jump out at the viewer.
I used different fonts and colors for the header and footer information to create contrast between the most important information: the date, time, and logo of the festival, and the descriptive text. Various character tools were used to make this text stand out, including outlining, tracking, leading, small caps, baseline shift for placement, and vertical scale, which was used to create the dramatic S in Sawdust. I used the eye dropper tool to create swatches of the two colors used in the image, and created a gradient which I used to shade the background of the poster. This allowed me to meet the project requirement of creating a full-color poster and to create the visual effect of the image blending into the background as an integrated part of the design.
InDesign
This page features the best of my work created with the Adobe InDesign software.
Humane Society Calendar: About this design:
In creating the Humane Society Calendar, my goal was to make a document that was both functional and visually attractive. I kept the calendar portion of the document large and relatively plain to allow space for users to make notes, and added some design elements such as attractive fonts, colors, and repeated designs around to calendar to make it look fun and attractive.
I carefully planned out the alignment and placement of all of the elements on the page, as the assignment required quite a few objects to appear in a single document (calendar, picture, and coupons), and ran the risk of becoming overly crowded. It was necessary to place the coupons in a place where they could be cut out without affecting the integrity of the rest of the document, and without taking valued space away from the calendar. I repeated the header for each calendar, including the font, color, and star pattern, to create a sense of consistency throughout the document. For the calendar header, I felt that the contrast between the white text and pattern and the dark background created a more dramatic look, sprucing up the relatively boring calendar. I used master pages to ensure that the decorative elements of the calendar were consistent from page to page. As I was working with a limited amount of page real estate, I decided to make use of the blank cells on the calendar to incorporate the “fun fact”, further helping to reduce crowding on the page.
While my finished product for this assignment is more plain and less artistic than the one I did for the festival poster, I felt that it was necessary for the calendar to have a more structured feel. Calendars primarily serve a functional purpose rather than an artistic one, and I did not want the decorative elements on the page to overtake the calendar. I chose to add minor decorative highlights, such as muted colors, attractive fonts, and the star pattern to accentuate the calendar rather than overwhelm it. I made an effort to choose attractive and visually striking photos that contrast with the plain calendar and make the overall image more visually pleasing. I feel that my intended audience will appreciate the photos as they display a variety of animals, rather than just those typically thought of as pets.
The coupons gave me an opportunity to have fun with fonts and characters, and I based my designs on other coupons I found online where the designer was working with extremely limited space. If I had had more space to fully develop my coupon design, I would have added more color and shapes to make them “jump out” at the user. However, since the coupons were so small I felt it was necessary to keep them minimalistic and only focus on the most important information.
