The base elements

As usual, much time was spent in looking for good stock photography. Perusing Flickr, it wasn’t long before I spotted the USC football player. Once I saw it — even in the thumbnails — I knew that was it. Beautiful lighting with a dark background. Menacing. In short: amazing. Finding a similar photo for the Cal Bears was another story. In the end, I settled for the one above. Even though the time of day didn’t match, the most important thing is making sure that the light source is similar. If you look at the two photographs above, you’ll notice that the light seems to be coming from “behind the camera” and to the left.

Compositing

In the rough poster above, I’ve masked the players, adjusted their levels slightly, and slapped on a cloudy background. Since the light source is similar, it’s more believable that the two of them were taken in the same shot (except the USC player is humungous compared to the Cal). Unfortunately, notice that the USC dude is cut off on the bottom. The cheap and easy way to solve this problem is to simply allow him to dissolve into the background. However, that method is very difficult to pull off professionally; that trick is used so many times that it’s become rather amateurish. The solution I chose is to incorporate typography as an element within the poster.

Typography: an element, not an afterthought

I still notice many designers using typography as an afterthought. They do their basic designs with their photo elements and brushes, but when it’s time to enter in text, they seem to slap it on rather than treating them as elements. In the step shown above, I’ve used the text treatment to cover up the USC player without it looking awkward. However, the text is more than mere fig leaves; words were carefully chosen, placement and layout were thought out, and font-families hand-picked (Aachen and Avant Garde Bk). In other words, don’t treat the text as second-rate citizens. They’re the elements that communicate to the audience; without the text, it’s just a meaningless poster. Learn more about typography. Use them well.

Blue and gold used here goes without saying.

Grids

I’ve said it before, and I’ll keep saying this over and over again. Grids are your friends. Back in the day, designers would have to manually draw out their grids with pencils and rulers. (Even further back, they would have to draw out their fonts!) Nowadays, it’s as simple as hitting apple+’.

There’s no excuse to be lazy. Use grids (and guides).

Final poster design can be viewed here.

This upcoming Saturday, Kairos Christian Fellowship will be having a getaway in the sierras. Unfortunately, that coincides with the big Cal vs. USC home game. As a way to draw students to choose the sierra trip over the game, we designed a poster for this event.

USC vs Cal - Kairos Sierra Lodge Getaway Poster (final)

More about the design process after the jump:

The most time-consuming part in designing this poster was making the water feel right. I’ve tried so many variations of water splashes, but they all looked flat, especially when added to the helmet. I even tried using the warp transform to make it wrap around the helmets a bit more, but that still didn’t look right.

Stock images of water found from sxc.hu

This was already my third (or so) attempt with the water wrapping around the helmets.

I showed this version (above) to my friends for feedback. Surprisingly, they actually liked the water effect (even though I did not); their only suggestion was to use a more modern font, especially for the “USC vs CAL” title. Their advice encouraged me to tackle the water problem anew — up until this point, I was ready to give up.

After toying around with the poster some more, I realized that a balloon pop photo might work as the splash element for the helmets. I’ve downloaded and tried the photo before, but I used it as drop elements (which didn’t quite work). It might just work to treat it as a huge, all-encompassing wall of water rather than a tiny speck:

In the above image: (1) Inserting the same photo over the Cal and USC helmets; (2) Changing the blend mode to screen; (3) Applying a large, soft-brushed mask to each bubble

After applying the realistic water splashes and making some more changes (noticeably on the text treatment), we have this:

This looks close to the final version, but not quite. After showing this to my design friends, one of them liked it immediately; the other suggested getting rid of the faint border altogether. Furthermore, I also noticed some design issues within the football/rain image:

Places where rain/splatter end too abruptly

After fixing those portions, inserting additional text (our getaway trip isn’t just about the football game), and making final color correction adjustments, we have the final result:

Etcetera

• Download the hi-res version of the USC vs Cal Football poster
• Source of my inspiration (it’s also a case study): Soldiers of Peace
• I’ve attached a psd of another poster in a previous post, but I’m not sure if anyone finds it useful. If enough people comment on this post, I’ll put it up.

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 »