Gracepoint After Five

Every year, after the New Student Welcome Night, each of the three sponsoring groups (a2f, Koinonia, and Kairos) put on their own Welcome Nights. Usually, the postcard graphic will be displayed on the respective websites, providing information about the event. This year, Kairos decided to try another route: we went the way of the poster.

More about the design process after the jump »

I wanted the poster to be relatively simple, yet I wanted it to be attractive in inviting people to the event. Since I have a day job and lots of other work, I didn’t want to spend more than a couple of hours on it, yet at the same time, I didn’t want the result to be crude and ugly. Thus, early on in the decision-making process, I knew that I wanted the poster to be a photograph of something, with minimal frills and flares added to it.

Evolution

1. First, I went straight to Flickr to find an image. I found a photo of bubbles blown into the evening sky (top-left), cropped it, and added some text to the bottom.
2. I found it to be a tad too frou-frou, so I channel-mixed the colors to a greener, more retro shade (top-right).
3. After consulting with some of my design friends (who also happen to be in Kairos), we thought that the resulting image was still too abstract. Thus, I found a photo of Berkeley from our Welcome Night two years ago, removed a few bubbles, modified the font a bit, and composited them together (bottom-left).
4. Since the sky takes up almost two-thirds of the whole poster, I painted in some clouds (with a clouds brush) to make the sky more interesting to look at. I tweaked the colors, added a vignette, and threw in some small text on the bottom, and out comes the finished product (bottom-right).

I think the whole process took me two hours; finding the right photos alone took about half an hour.

You can download the .psd file for your own enjoyment (14mb).
My fonts of choice are: Bauhaus 93, Museo, and Miso.

One advice: use grids

One thing I find again and again with novice graphic designers is the lack of attention to typography, specifically, in laying out text without the use of grids. Grids are a designer’s friend! Simply adhering to grids can make a graphic 5x better. In my design, “Kairos Welcome Night” was about 4 blocks tall; the info line beneath was about two, and the tiny line about one. Notice the vertical spacing between the text, too. Properly sticking to grids gives rhythm and meter to the type; it allows the text to have “breathing room” and makes them much more pleasant to look at.

Additional reading

I think I’ve only begun scratching the surface in creating posters/designs. Again, this was a relatively simple poster — more time and effort are involved in more complex designs. I came up with two more resources that have more in-depth tutorials on poster designs:

The CONNECTED poster

This article came out today! They’re very thorough in articulating the design process. I was pleasantly surprised at the depth to which they covered their pre-design process. Indeed, so much work is often expended before the designer even opens up Photoshop, and I’m glad they captured this in their blog.

Read more about the CONNECTED poster article »

ISO50

Amongst my friends, it is rather well-known that I’ve been a big fan of ISO50 (aka Scott Hansen) for some time now. I’ve bought four of his posters (one I gave away to a friend in Taiwan). In fact, the Kairos poster was largely inspired by one of his for a recent event:

ISO50 is probably more well-known to the general public for his Obama Print. He has an amazing article detailing that process — it’s a beauty to see the print evolve, and reading his insights is a real gem. Unlike the Kairos poster, which is designed only for web consumption, Scott’s end goal is to produce a physical print, and a good chunk of his article is dedicated to detailing that (“post-design”) process.

Read more about the Making of the Obama print article »

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2. USC vs Cal – Sierra Lodge Football Poster
3. New Student Welcome Night video advertisements

Tagged as inspiration, process + Categorized as Design