Chicago Olympic 2016 poster
This is the poster that I chose to base my event poster off of:
Original World's Fair Chicago Poster (1933)
I love the colors, the type, and the general sense of organized chaos. Here is the event poster I created for class:
Chicago Olympics 2016 poster
Certainly there are things I want to change and work on, but I'm very happy with it overall given the amount of time I had to work on it. I'm proud of myself for trying some techniques that I'm new to and learned some new things along the way. I deem this a success.
The main pieces I want to work on are all of the pieces of text. The tracking and spacing of the paragraphs at the bottom are truly awful, but I just didn't have enough time to fix that. I also need to get rid of that dead space above the Olympic logo. The list of venues on the right isn't tight and seems to draw too much focus to itself, so I'd work on that as well.
I like the buildings and the colors used on them. I like the backgrounds of the left and right columns. I kept on creating a pattern swatch using the splatter brush, but it kept looking terrible when I applied the pattern to the background. Finally, I just used the symbol sprayer and it created the random look I was aiming for. I like that the background looks like stars and that it contains faint hints of the building color scheme.
I struggled with Live Paint on some spots, but managed to work around those problems well enough.
Now let's hope Chicago can add another star to the Chicago flag in 2016.
Illustrator class poster idea
I'm about half-way into my Illustrator class at RISD and I'm so glad I'm taking it. It's not terribly difficult to teach yourself Photoshop or Illustrator, but they are both massive programs with a lot of sophisticated features and it's hard to know where to begin. This class has really helped speed up my learning curve. One of my blessings and curses is that I'm comfortable with Photoshop and the two programs are similar in significant ways and yet very different in others. When things are different, it makes it more confusing and frustrating when something doesn't work the way I expect it to (i.e.- I'm addicted to creating layers in Photoshop and have really had to change that instinct for Illustrator because it is simply designed to be used differently. I'm getting there!)
Most of our projects have been short exercises in using specific tools and techniques. They are starting to become a little bit more complex now, which is a lot more fun because we're actually designing fun pieces like posters. Our last assignment was to create an 11x17 vertical event poster meeting these requirements:
- a customized headline or title treatment
- sub-headlines
- three-threaded paragraphs of type
- drawn, traced, placed and/or blend-mode images
- patterns (if applicable)
My first plan was to make up a fake band and a fake concert event. I spent a week creating one and liked what I made well enough to bring the work-in-progress to class for a critique, but I also thought it was a boring concept and I couldn't stop thinking of other event ideas, which is a good sign that my heart isn't into it and I'm not going to create something I actually like.
My hometown of Chicago has come up a lot lately and at one point it occurred to me that I should do a Chicago event poster...maybe a blues or jazz fest? It eventually occurred to me that Chicago is a candidate for the 2016 Olympics, and I had that "Yes! That's it!" moment. I scrapped my fake band for my former city. It felt somewhat ambitious for my skill level, but screw it, I didn't sign up for classes to avoid challenges. I'm supposed to be making mistakes and learning.