Event Poster Design

Your Mission

Think of an interest which could be made into an event. Some examples could be:

Snowboarding:

Your event would be a race weekend at Whistler sponsored by Coors Light.

Playing the harmonica:

Your event would be a Neil Young concert tour named Heart of Gold.

Literary or Book Festival:

Your event could be An Evening with William Gibson: Pattern Recognition (One of his books).

The more specific you are with your event theme the better. A snowboarding event is too general. However, a snowboarding event at Whistler mountain, sponsored by Maxim Magazine is much better.

A poster for a movie opening is boring. But a poster for a Guerilla Drive-in film festival is really cool.

Slideshow

Your Approach

You'll design a tabloid-sized poster for your event. You'll have to include all of the information to invite your target demographic to your shindig. You can start with who?, what?, where?, when? why?.

You should not paint full photographs. The point of this assignment is to make your poster look like it's made of all of your own artwork. You can, however, trace over photographs to re-interpret them as your own illustrations.

This is how you would go about this

• Choose a photo you wish to use in your poster
• Trace it with whatever media you want.
• Scan it.
• Import/place it in Illustrator
• Use Live Trace and Live Paint to make it vectors.

These are the intellectual property implications of doing this in the real world. You would use your own photos to do this kind of thing, so that you don't get accused of stealing someone else's work. If you did use someone else's photo, your painted version can look nothing like the original. The author couldn't accuse you of anything that way. That's totally on the up-and-up.

This is one project where you can actually use images from the Web. I find that sometimes, low resolution images trace better than high rez ones.

We want this poster to really be stylish. For this reason, we're going to limit colours and fonts. You will use Kuler.com to design a colour scheme. You'll add it to your Illustrator swatches and limit yourself to that palette. Remove unused swatches from the palette.

The same will go for fonts. You are limited to only one main family. Choose a varied family to ensure you have enough variety for your poster. If necessary, you can use a second family for secondary content as displayed on the samples in the slideshow. You are also limited to the fonts in Font Folio 11. You know were to get them.

Shades of Grey

We're going to take a different approach to design and colour selection for this assignment. You are actually going to design this poster in greyscale. We'll create a series of grey global swatches in the Swatches palette. Once you have designed your poster, we'll re-colour the artwork using Illustrator's built-in re-colouring tools.

You will design your initial poster in greyscale. You will then create three more artboards with the poster to which you will apply your Kuler colour groups. These are the three designs we will show the client.

Working With Gradients

Illustrator Skills

This assignment includes:

Drawing:

Tracing artwork with Live Trace

Painting:

Painting with fills and strokes, Live Paint groups, Gradients and Patterns

Typography:

Apply all the typography skills you've learned to date. Pay special attention to using point type vs. area type in the right circumstances.

Recolour Artwork:

We will use the Re-colour Artwork functionality in Illustrator to apply three different colour schemes from Adobe Kuler.

How to get an A

You will be graded on:

The effective & creative use of the tools listed above

You'll want to make the most of the original artwork you've chosen with the Live Trace and Live Paint tools. Using the appropriate Live Trace settings will enhance the appearance of your original.

The appeal of your poster

Your poster should have all of the required elements to inform attendants of the time and place of your event. Secondly, it should appeal to existing fans and entice new ones to attend. The artwork should be appropriate to the subject matter. These posters are going to appeal to a specific crowd. Ensure it's high on style.

Compliance with guidelines on this page

This pretty much speaks for itself. Make you poster the right dimensions (tabloid, portrait). Create your bleeds properly. Name all of your layers. Mask excess artwork. Delete un-used anchor points.

Deliverables

• Tabloid portrait format
• With or without bleeds
• You will hand in the Illustrator file with all fonts.
• Your Illustrator file will have four artbords: One greyscale, plus three different colour themes.
• Do not outline your fonts.
• You should have no more placed images, since you painted them all. Make sure you expand them.
• Include a folder with all of the scans used in your piece.
• Include any other files you think will help with the evaluation of your work.