OUGD601 - Practical: Poster Development & Finishing

Following the progress made on poster #7, I wanted to refine it as much as possible to make sure I had it, and the poster designs as good as I could get them. 

I printed poster #7 to see how well it printed and worked as a physical copy instead of just on-screen. The immediate concern is on the background and how dark it has printed. This is something that will need to be looked into. Another concern is that at the current state, the heading doesn't look as realistic printed as I had hoped, so this will also need to be sorted.

I tried out a few different opacities for both the heading and the background.

I decided on the following - the background with an opacity of 90%. This makes it slightly lighter so that when it prints it will be clearly a chalkboard and the markings will be clear. I decided on the heading being at an 85% opacity so it sits better against the background and does look a bit more authentic.

Following this I wanted to focus back on the typography itself. While I had initially thought the heading works well on all the posters, I do feel that this hand drawn type poster doesn't quite have the same impact.

I decided on resizing the 'the' and 'mac' so they are smaller, and scaling the 'big' larger, so it had more of an impact on the poster. With the 'the' and 'mac' scaling down, I also decided to invert them back into block shapes for now as they don't need to be quite so subtle now they are smaller.

I then applied this heading hierarchy and size to the other six posters.

Original design:

Changed heading designs:

I think that overall this was a good move and gives the 'big' much more impact and presence on all the posters.

I then got back to work on the hand drawn poster in terms of making it look a bit more realistic. The chalk effect is only on the heading at this point, so I wanted to see how it would work on the rest of the poster. I also was still unsure about the heading itself and the lettering style.

I added the chalk texture to the body copy brackets and experimented with the heading font style.

I decided that the original style was the best one, having the 'the' and 'mac' in outlines. It contrasts well against the 'big' and tag line.

At this point I decided to change the body copy font to the same as the tag line. I like the scripted font much more than the one used above which is all uppercase without any variation. The scripted font has a bit more character I feel and is a bit more casual in appearance, really working with the idea of being home made and personal.

I also added the chalk texture to this body copy and set all elements using this texture to the same opacity of 85% to keep it all consistent.

Final Poster:

Overall I am really pleased with this poster. I was initially quite worried at how it would turn out with the type being hand drawn by myself, so it had to be good otherwise it wouldn't look very professional. I think the adding of the chalk texture really added another dimension to the design and does help in the idea of making it look more like it is hand drawn than edited digitally.

At this point I have decided that I will be printing the posters to an A2 size in height.