This brief was all about creating a poster for a fictional event inspired by the TV show The Great British Sewing Bee called 'Sewing Belfast'. We were encouraged to use sewing imagery and link it in with symbols of Belfast.
To gather ideas I created a board on Pinterest and posted my own photographs and fonts, posters and imagery that inspired me. This was extremely useful as I had noticed on the last brief- it worked like a moodboard and helped my creative process along when I was creating the poster and its styling details.
I actually ended up making a few different concepts for a poster but this was my final one and the one I was most pleased with stylistically.
I decided to use an A3 sized horizontal page in Photoshop because my favoured photographs were horizontal and would look better if they stayed that way. I then tried a few different photographs before settling on my favourite one; taken outside the Titanic Museum with the sculpture Titanica as the main subject. I chose it because I wanted to use a photograph with a clear focus on an object that still represents Belfast- other photos with buildings as the focus didn't look quite right.
I edited the photograph by playing around with contrast, exposure, hue and saturation to make the poster look more dynamic and pleasing to the eye.
I was inspired by how magazine covers often create depth by creating a geometric shape or using a heading and placing part of the picture in the foreground. I did this by creating a rectangle in Photoshop with no filling and a thick white border using the shape tool. Then I selected the statue using the quick select tool and hit 'layer via copy' to place the statue on a new layer in front of the border. This created the effect of the border sitting behind the statue and made the whole layout more 3-dimensional and dynamic.
I then decided that I wanted to make the heading of the poster in an illustrative cursive font to create the effect of sewing thread. I placed it in the top right hand corner to even out the focus of the poster- the statue is in the bottom left corner and opposing it will draw the viewer's eye to the centre and make the whole composition look better.
I then added the details for the event in block capitals to contrast with the swirling cursive font.
CRITIQUE
All in all I'm very happy with how my poster looks- I feel it looks modern and dynamic but still relates to the themes of sewing and Belfast. I made lots of concept poster ideas at the start but this one was the last one. I feel like my skills developed because of my experiments because I'm very happy with this one even though it's quite minimalist but I feel like the composition is the most effective and it's aesthetically pleasing. I was concerned that I had wasted my time because of all the poster ideas I tried out but I definitely feel like it paid off.
One thing I would change is that I feel like I should have taken more photos once I knew what I wanted my poster to look like- this might have helped me when I was designing it.
