Fearless Poster Design

1. Introduction to Modern Poster Design: Let's get straight to the point. There is no magic formula when it comes to post roommates are no divine secrets that get passed down from the masters once they feel like their apprentices are worthy, poster design is not complicated and the rules that come along with it are pretty liberally open to interpretation. The most important thing that you can ever bring to a poster design is muscle, not those kind of muscles. These muscles, I'm talking about the creative muscle which only gets developed after you've spent a lot of time well doing the work and the level of creativity is always dictated by the constraints of the poster itself, but also anyone that you were trying to inform, delight or in gender to the message that you're trying to share. Course the message is always up to interpretation depending on what type of poster you're trying to make, whether you're trying to capture enough attention to get people to adhere to whatever it is you're trying to advise them on or you're not saying anything directly. And the imagery is what has the message that is only going to be absorbed by those who understand the particular visual language you're sharing. And aside from all that creative effort, the most important tool that you have is a self-awareness about who you are as a creative person. Poster design is the most one when it's a true reflection of the artist or designer behind. My name is Dave Connery and I've been a publication and promotional designer for going on 25 years And, and poster design is probably my most favorite thing that I get to do because of the near limitless potential for creativity, especially when we may be limited by certain constraints that go along with the poster, like say, sizing, printing or most likely cost. Now the main purpose of this course is to show you how I would go about designing step-by-step two different types of posters. One that is a little bit more direct and informative and another a little bit more abstract and shared, some re-expressed. And both of them are going to have a very unique message which is intended for their particular audio. We're going to discuss techniques and considerations to think about before the work you can begin. We'll talk about how to pull back on some things if maybe things are getting a little bit too intense or dial up that intensity and go whole hog into whatever it is that we're making. We will talk briefly about some history and some style and also share some of my favorite influences in the space. Because before we get to go where we're going, we kinda have to know where we came from. Did I mention fun? We're gonna have a little bit of fun too. Oh, don't mind her. She's just here to protect me. A bit of a cook. And by the end of this, not only you're going to come up with two new poster designs, but also a better understanding about what makes the difference between a good poster and a great one. So if you're ready for that, let's get started. 2. Rules for Poster Design: Okay, let's talk about rules for poster design. Rule number one. There are no rules. There you go. See you in the next video. Okay, for real though, when it comes to the creative process behind poster design, there really are no rules, unlike many of the other things that you can design out there. There aren't very many of them that have as few limitations as poster design, t-shirt design would probably be a close second, but there are some limitations there because people a little bit more reserved sometimes about what they'll put on their body versus what they'll hang on their wall. Postcard designs like these are also another option for doing really creative work. But obviously you're limited by the amount of space. You don't want to get too crazy on here. However, with postcards, you do have the backside where you can put more extra information which allows for really good creative stuff happening on this side. So if anything, the only constraints that you have on poster designer things like the budget size of the paper that you're printing on types of printing that you're doing, and maybe the client's brief because they maybe they've got some rules of their own that they want you to follow up. But other than that, poster designer meant to be a true creative expression and visual styles and ideas. And sometimes the more expressive, the better. But let's talk about some of those considerations you may want to make before you even begin. For instance, what's the primary purpose of that poster is gonna be hung in some specific places that are meant to communicate certain ideas. Like you're trying to get certain kinds of information out to people. Say for instance, maybe a hospital, clinic or a government agency? Or is it meant to sit and like some mark key window like to introduce a movie or a play. Or maybe it's meant to be some sort of souvenir, like something somebody would buy at an event like say, maybe a convention or a rock concert or something that they wanted to take home with them. Each one of those has a very specific intended audience and you need to make a consideration for that audience before you design anything. Say for instance, you're trying to design a poster to bring awareness to the dangers of vaping and electronic cigarettes. Well, maybe you don't want that to look exactly like some sort of rock poster design. Or maybe you do, because if you're trying to share the dangers of vaping with young adults, well then maybe a progressive rock concert style approach will get their attention better. Poster size is another consideration that you might want to look at. In fact, sometimes it might actually be the space where the poster is going to be. Your client may have a very specific place in mind that needs to hang that pollster. So you're obviously going to need to ask that question like, What size do you want the poster to be? Well, it has to be, has to fitness brain where maybe they're going to send all these to different places all over the place that each one has a unique space to fill. So you kinda have to compensate for all of them by designing for one. That's a difficult hurdle at times because maybe the wall at one place would be huge and then the wallet in another place is really small and you got to find the happy medium between those two buds. It may be a major factor because maybe your customer wants to design a full color 24 by 36 inch poster, but they only have enough money for 11 by 17 black and white coat photocopy. And the size may also dictate the design. Because if you're working on something that's like say 11 by 14, you're not gonna have as much space to put any kind of texts that you might need to communicate. And so you need to compensate your design for that. And finally, the last consideration that might have some influence on your design is how are you going to get this printed? Because obviously you're going to take a much different approach to your design when you're doing a black and white flyer versus a full color poster, even if you're designing and color, you have considerations to make because there's a big difference between designing for like a four color offset press versus say like a 2234567 color screen for, and this doesn't just affect the color, it's actually going to affect the design outcome because you're going to have to design different. So now if you've taken into consideration all of those things now you're ready design and now you're ready to go nuts. Let's go break some rules. 3. Talking About Poster Types: This one I'm gonna be shooting from the hip a little bit talking about different types of posters, like whether it's social change or gig posters or informational base posters. And just kinda going on a riff about what I think about some of the posters you're about ready to see first, we need to jump into one of my most favorite design inspiration places on the web, which is design inspiration.com. Think of it as like Pinterest, but just for design stuff and not like ads for weight-loss and Spanx up. And if you ever want to go here, It's pretty cool because you jump in and it automatically start you off with a color palette of whatever these designs are. They just kinda pull this up randomly and as you click through these different colors, it will switch up to the next one and you kinda go in there and then you can dive into one of these and you can go deeper on that as like, Oh, look at where this is going to take me all, what is this gonna go? And again, more color palette over here. And then you go down and you find some more images and careful because there might be a little bit of NSF W stuff going on, but you click on this one and it's different in more color palettes and more different pieces. It's really cool. I really dig design inspiration and you should go check it out. Not affiliated, no endorsements. Just go anyway. So let's talk about sociopolitical type posters like protests posters, political vote posters and things like that. Because those posts for types or they have a very specific idea behind the meaning. They're trying to get your attention like real fast. They're trying to elicit some sort of passion within the person that's viewing so that they'll join, whatever it is that the person who designed it wanted them to join, foster more change, get involved, et cetera, et cetera. Okay. Not everything on this page is based on that idea. Number two, this might share some political beliefs that you disagree with them. That's not what this is about. We're just here to talk about how to affect change through posters. So as I start to scroll through these, some of these jump out a little bit more than others. Like say for instance, this one, which is a very cliche approach to poster design. Because if you're not familiar with this poster design, it was originated by poster artist, designer and artist Shepard Fairey. And he created the Obama Hope poster, which cause lot of controversy and whatnot. And that's this indicative of Shepherd style. Now obviously this one is trying to garner some attention based on a shepherd berries as success with that poster. Here it is, spirit, some change, which obviously is a commentary about homelessness and maybe mental illness or whatever. There's no description here of what's going on. But it obviously brings people in because they've made an immediate association with not only the design, but also what's being said. Now the rescuer is that this can tend to be a bit cliche because a lot of people have done derivatives of that Shepherd very posters, some have been jokes, some have been real. And this one, obviously it's meant to create some real awareness towards this thing, but people might discount it just because they've seen this so many different times. This is one here is a silhouette of Nelson Mandela. Always seems impossible until it's done. Really nice. Calligraphy, it's good, strong, powerful, gets the point across. Now if it didn't say Nelson Mandela, I wouldn't know if that was his quote or not. So there's probably a flock here. If we can't identify who it is without the name, then how is anybody else who's never known, who knows a medulla is going to have any idea what's going on in social change areas are very prominent. You'll see fists ever hands in a lot of these posters. This one is unique because obviously it's a little bit more abstract. It's definitely supposed to be a fist, but there's obviously a heart going on here as well. This is also a Nelson Mandela reference. So it's the idea of creating Change and awareness, hopping over to printers real quick because I couldn't quite find as many posters as I wanted to in this area. If I go to this one here about protests, posters, you'll see that there's a lot, again, a lot of fifths. Do you see that one there? There's a hand here. Well, that's a foot and a peace sign and other fifths, more fists, more hands, hands together, hands apart. So it's a very powerful message about people working together. One of the other things that you'll notice you just even just scroll through. This is very strong, bold colors, very simple imagery. This one here is very simple, and it gets the message across pretty well, even though it's definitely not, it's not obvious what it's about occupied Gazi. I'm not sure what that means, but I get the point. It has something to do with hands together and medicine and whatnot. Another powerful Shepard Fairey poster, this one is, I believe Angela Davis, I'm not a 100% sure on that, but I believe that's what it is, visible power inequality. She was a notable Black Panther back in the sixties and seventies. Very bold, strong colors meant to get people's attention and make some sort of immediate connection to both the face and the idea. But again, what I see most going on here is that it's a really simple design that's meant to be bold, meant to be maybe a little bit alarming and meant to get your attention so that they can hopefully get you involved in whatever it is that they're trying to talk to you about. Now let's talk about band posters or rock posters, or as they were commonly referred to back when I was coming up as a designer, gig posters. So those not familiar, gig posters.com was a website where I would frequent on a regular basis. It was a kind of a bulletin board style website, but you could also share your design work there. And it had, it wasn't so much that like a Pinterest style, but it definitely you could go through the catalog and see different designers, different bands, what pollsters were related to those different bands? And there were a lot of incredibly talented people that congregated on that website on a regular basis. I would go there for design inspiration all the time. Unfortunately, it's now defunct. The epi go to gig posters.com. It's still a poster related thing, but it's not anywhere. It's not even the same identity that it was before. It's really a resource that's being missed in the poster community, but we do have design inspiration and we can go here and see some of these things. Unfortunately, some of the times these things aren't attributed to the right people. But let's take a look anyway. The thing I love most about gig posters is that you really can take this opportunity to be expressive in unique ways. Some bands or production companies or people who are management teams that are wanting to hire. These designers to do these posters, they go after particular designers because of the style that they've already been proven to express. So somebody that has a design style like say this national poster right here. Maybe the person who went after this poster or who hired this designer to do this thing. If it was actually somebody who got hired or somebody that just decided to make a poster like this, they went after this particular style because it was more in line of what they thought the national myth as opposed to this truck fighters poster, which is obviously a little bit more Illustrated, more cartoony, more indicative of maybe what the band is about. Maybe the band just loved the artist, or maybe it's just coincidentally they wanted to have this artist on this poster and turn it around the next time and did a completely different art. And whenever you're talking to gig poster designers, they will always give you different reasons about why they went about the design in a certain way. Some are very literal. They will listen to the band, to listen to the songs. They'll look at the album cover and they'll do something that's very indicative of that. Like it feels like something that definitely looks and feels like what they assumed that band would be about. Other people will just shoot from the hip and just kinda create something based on whatever happens to be going through their mind at the time. Maybe they've listened to the album, but they're not letting the words of the song titles or the album name, Do we have any kind of influence? They're just taking in what they can and turning it into something. Or they'll do something derivative of the names like this is the new choreographers. And it's obviously a play on the idea that we watch *********** in certain ways. But this is obviously a very old television in a very old VHF style of tele programming, you wouldn't watch *********** on this television, but that's the, that's the fun part. We're just having fun with this. So there's a lot of cartoons stuff, There's some abstract stuff, There's very direct stuff, There's some grit and grunge, all different types of styles. But one thing you'll see is that sometimes the color palettes are very similar. Like if you look at this bowerbirds one here, or this national over here, or if you look at this one that has been fulls or any of these other ones, you'll notice a very similar color palette, and that's for a very specific reason. These are all screened printed posters. Even this one here, which is bold and bright and colors, this one, I'm assuming without looking too deeply, that this was actually designed by a very famous poster designer named Frank cozy. He's well-known for using big bold color, big bold imagery like this cartoony in nature and this layout is basically his style. I'm not sure if Frank was ever a very accomplished designer, but he was very accomplished illustrator obviously. And he just kinda implemented topography, how he saw fit. It became a thing for them and this is what it would look like. So again, no rules when it comes to gig posters, especially in this arena, because bands allow you to be a little bit flexible with things. And these things are usually not posted up at the show to tell you about the poster. These are actually usually turned into something that you would buy when you went to the show. So a fan of the national defense of Nathaniel Rec, fan of mad rat, they would go to the show and they might buy that particular poster. Not necessarily meant to communicate to people to come see the show. It's more like, Hey, here's your token for being here at the shift, your claim to fame that you came to this show before this band was cool and now that they're big and they're not cool anymore, you can say, I remember when I'm gonna cut this off right here, but in the next video, I'm actually going to go deeper. I'm gonna go and pick some specific designs and talk about what it is about those particular designs, why that works for that particular subjects. So stay tuned for that. 4. Some Detailed Poster Examples: Okay, let's get deeper. I found some poster designs that I want to dig into a little bit and get a little bit more specific about each one of these. Now these come in different categories, all different types of approach and style. Just want to kind of talk about each one and kinda share my thoughts. And maybe that might inspire you in whatever it is you're trying to make for yourself. Also, some of these images are going to be a little bit small, little bit rough, not a whole lot of clarity in some of these areas, so I apologize for that, but you get the general idea as we go through. Okay, so this first one is the Innovator's Cookbook. And I'm not a 100% sure if this is a poster or if it's a book cover, but it could be a poster based on a book cover, but it says the essentials for inventors. What is next? Now if you look at this, it's interesting because you might just assume right out of the gate that this is three-dimensional topography. Somebody created it in some sort of app. Maybe they didn't illustrate or something, then just put a drop shadow and then called it done. But that's actually not what happened here. If you look closely at some of these, you can see that even though it's very well current, it's hand current. Like literally somebody made these, printed them out with a 3D printer and then had them stacked in a way so that they can be photographed with that shadow is if you look at this T next to the H in the Word and the Word, you can see that the gap at the top is a little bit different than the gap at the bottom. And this T is just leaning slightly to the left. Again, I apologize for the blurriness, but as you can see, This apostrophe here in inventors has this little dangling, little thing hanging down here that's resting on this bit of plastic that's been leaked out. And you can see all these other little bits of plastic that have been leaked out. What they probably did is they printed this out and they needed some way to make this stuff stand up. So they used one of those 3D printing pens to kinda glue these things together. My assumption with this is that we're looking at a poster that's promoting this book idea, which is all about innovation and invention. And it does so by using a very simple technique with typography that was made by the invention that they're probably talking about in the book itself. Brilliant. Now this one is for an event, it's actually German or Dutch. I'm not a 100% sure, but it's for an event that features what I'm guessing is the wheel aerates architects. These show is called stills. I'm guessing. I don't speak German, I don't know. But what I love about this is like the main information that's important, like chunk, which I'm guessing is the event venue and then the importance of this particular info here, because that's the show that's being shown. There's some detailed information here and then obviously some logos down here at the bottom. That's all the information to get your attention. That's what you need to know about the shelf. The name of the show stills is being communicated with this kind of development where it starts here and kinda builds as it goes down the page, which is like what architects, designers do, they build until they get more structured towards the very end in something that actually is communicated and easy to understand. Here's another social change poster. This one says stop human trafficking, which is obviously a clever way of doing this where they put the stop as the light of the stoplight here. And it says 1.2 million people are trafficked every single day. And I can't read what this picture is, but it looks like a young child holding a sign and some other information. So it's obviously it's very clear cut, but what it's trying to communicate now, I'm not a 100% sure if I feel these lines back here, that obviously helps set that image away from itself a little bit. I almost feel like it could have just gone without those completely unjust been the stop sign up there by itself, or do something really radical and go more black and white or black and yellow, caution lines or whatnot. And that might bring some attention to, but that's just one designers opinion. I do like the simpleness of this design and it definitely gets your attention right away. Especially if that was, that bread was really brilliant, bright red, or if it was, this was like say a screen printed poster and that red was like just popped right off the page. I think that would be really cool. Now I'm pretty sure this one isn't an official poster. I think this is a fan pollster of the movie machete, but it, it gets the message across really good if you've never seen much at day or if you've ever seen Desperado or any of those movies by Robert Rodriguez. This is obviously meant to look like Danny tray holder, famous actor, but he's also in the movie is the guy that deals with knives, his mustache, instead of being a mustaches, these two knives. So I thought it was kinda clever. Now, type is pretty straightforward. It's nothing really fancy. I would probably have done something that was a little bit more hand painted myself, but I'm not mad at this. I think it's kinda cool, is a simple way to express an appreciation for this particular movie. And it could be a movie poster. It would get somebody's attention for sure. I would have no problem with this beam used as a movie promotional poster because I think that it does, it works. Now this one is intense because this is an infographic poster, at least a nipple graphic graphic. I don't know if they actually turned it into a poster, but we'll just assume that it was turned into a poster, but there's a lot of information here. It's obviously needs to be conveyed in a way that kinda gets people's attention enough to read it and makes them want to continue reading it throughout all this stuff down here. If I'm immediately just reading this as straight text on a page, I might be like I'm ignoring all of this, but the visual standard that the colors, the graphics, everything. Works its way and pulls you through this poster all the way to the bottom. Now, infographics is a special talent unto itself, one that I personally don't possess because I don't know. I just it's just not something I personally enjoy doing. But if you like doing infographic type of stuff, I mean, it's really cool. Just makes sure that you're keeping people's attention. You're breaking the information apart and makes sure that it's something that people can easily latch onto, even if it's like they're latching onto one section at a time. They're jumping from one thing to the next to the next. It's not something that they have to go to the top and read all the way to the bottom. But maybe you get them in for a little bit and then they go back and read the rest later. Now, this last one is interesting to me because it is largely typography. But The funny thing is, is that the typographic stuff that's being put on here? Most of this isn't meant to communicate to the people that are actually seeing the poster. Maybe it is, maybe it's not. But as you can see, it's a huge combination of Chinese and Japanese characters. But when you read this part here, it's actually written in Portuguese. I don't know how to pronounce Portuguese words, but I believe it says expose a cow. The photograph is, I don't know how to pronounce that, but you go here and as a society odd day Macau and then durante a Guerra. Nasa, I actually did a Google Translate on this. And basically what it means is like an exhibition of photographs by the Society of Macau or the Macau society. And around here, Dante or Guerra has reference to the Sino-Japanese War. There's actually two Sino-Japanese War. It's one that happened in the 19th century when that happened kind of close to World War II in the 20th century. So these pictures that you see in here are all a reference to probably one, if not both, of these wars. Everything else here is just a reference to how the Japanese kind of integrated conjugate into their culture but also tried to dominate China during these two wars. Now I don't know where this Macau society is. Maybe in Macau they speak a lot of Portuguese. It could be in Brazil where they speak a lot of Portuguese and there's a lot of people in Brazil with Japanese origins. So I find this poster very interesting because most of this stuff on this page is actually just meant as decorative aspects. It's meant to be part of the design. And the real core information that you're supposed to pull from is everything that's in white. Now maybe the people who are meant to read this can read this conchae, or maybe it's just another representation of conduit or it's a crossover between the people who can obviously read Portuguese and maybe some can read both conjugate and Portuguese. I'm not a 100% sure, but I think it's cool that they've made it very clear what information is here for the event and everything else that just kinda creates this idea of the culture that revolves around that senior Japanese experience. So there's a lot of stuff to take him there. And what I recommend is for you is just go to dabble, go into design inspiration, go into Pinterest and just type in poster protests, posters, propaganda poster, social change clothes or rock posters, gig poster, information poster infographics just type that in and just pull information into your knowledge base of pulsars so that you get a better understanding of how layouts work, how colors work, how everything kinda pulls together. And one of the things I love to do with, especially with the gig posters as all go look at pollsters for a particular band. So let's say you want to look up Foo Fighters. So you go look up Foo Fighters posters and just the different ideas that people have come to that they pulled from listening to Foo Fighters being Foo Fighters fans, or maybe they hate the Foo Fighters and they still designed to poster for them because they like to get paid for people, even if they don't like them. There's just so many different ways people will look at a particular Foo Fighters album, Foo Fighters concert, Foo Fighters presence, and turn that into interesting things for themselves and for the fans. So long story short, pull some information, interpret it your way, and then turn that into something cool for yourself or your client or whoever it is you're designing this poster for. 5. Printing Types: Let's talk about printing techniques. I think sport to talk about printing techniques because how you print is definitely going to have an influence on how you design. Now there are many different ways to get posted printed, but the most popular being digital printing, G clay printing, laser printing. And a differentiate that from digital printing because when I think of more like inks versus lasers, more toner offset printing, screen printing and lithograph. So let me clarify that lithograph. So probably not used nearly as much as they used to in the past. There are more of an art print thing versus like say a screen printing for regular posters or whatnot. But there is still a popular style, at least for particular artists who are doing a very particular thing. We're not going to talk about much about them, but it's out there. It's an option. Now with digital gi, clay and laser, they can all be printed directly from the file that you provide. And often they can be provided also in short runs and printed on-demand. And although digital printing and laser printing are incredibly convenient, I mean, you may even have a high-quality print or write in your home, or you can go to the local coffee shop and get something printed. Typically, they are the lowest quality of all printers. You can get some really high-quality prints done this way. But if you compare them side-by-side to other printing processes, you're usually sacrificing some that quality for the convenience and being able to print whenever you want. And G clay prints are also digital, but they produce a much higher quality because they use more inks and they have a very specific color sets. So you get a lot more richer experience with the G clay print, but they can be a lot more costly than traditional digital prints. And so that can be cost-prohibitive for some people, you're also not likely to find a G clay printer that we'll do print on-demand unless you go with a print on demand company that does g clay quality level prints. The thing about going with a print on demand company like printf or print to print your on-demand G clay prints is that you get no say in what happens with the color. You produce something and they print it and they send it to you. But you don't necessarily get to say, well, the quality here, maybe I need a little bit more blue in here, maybe some more yellows, maybe a little bit more grace in places you don't get that attention with printf, printf fine. But if you went to a reputable G clay print company, you could get that. However, they are not likely going to do short runs for you, or even simple one print on-demand poster at a time. This is a digitally printed G clay print on-demand poster. And it's, it's pretty good. I liked the color going on here. I'm not very particular about this particular design. It was made to just hang in a coffee shop locally here. But if I want it to be more particular about the color here, I probably wouldn't do print on-demand. And because it did come out a little bit more muted than I expect if I wanted it to be a little bit better quality than I would go with either something like screen print or go with a G clay print company that is more reputable for their art related prints, offset printing or CMYK printing as some people refer to it as is. It's a different process. You take your file, you give it to the print shop, and they take that and they do separations where they separate the colors of the image and turn them into different plates. So you will have a cyan plate, a magenta plate, a yellow plate, and a black plate. And they take those plates, put them on the printer. And as the paper runs through the printer machine, that barrel for that particular plate will put down that color and it does it in that order. So it lays down the cyan, then it lays down the magenta, and then it lays down the yellow and then it lays down the black. I'm also printing is probably the most popular way of getting posters printed, and obviously probably the most efficient and cost-effective. However, CMYK has some limitations with color. And if you wanted to add more color into the mix, like adding a fifth or sixth or seventh color to the process, It's going to be substantially more expensive. And on top of that, it'd be tough to find shops that will do less than 500 posters at a time. So if you aren't looking to get 500 posters printed, well, you may go with different options. There are shops that will do probably less than 500, but they will most likely do it in what they call a gang run. So they will take your print job and they will put it on one gigantic sheet with all these other print projects are the exact same time. They'll run them altogether and that's cool. You get to have the lower amount there plus a probably a lower cost. The thing is though, is that you don't get to dictate what the color is and the colorist or the printer is looking at the color as a whole on that whole sheet, rather than just the color for your particular poster. So it'd be very specific and particular about your print color. You don't want to go that route. Now before we talk about screen printing, I wouldn't be perfectly clear about something I personally have never screened, printed my own poster. I have had posters of my work screen printed before, so I know what I'm expecting when it comes to the screen printing, but I've never actually done it myself. Because if you're like me and probably 90% of all the other people out there, that body speed balls, green printing kit from whatever local art store and said, I'm going to try this and then you find it that it's actually so much more strenuous than you expected. Well, that box and everything that went in it, it's sitting up there on a shelf collecting dust. Also, I won't be talking about screen printing much beyond this video right here, maybe just in passing when making references to things, but I won't be talking about the process at all because there are plenty of other videos out there that you can go look at to see how a screen printing is done. More likely from people who have actually done it. Our professionals at it and are better resource than I am. That said, screen printing to me is the most aesthetically pleasing type of printing for posters out there, perhaps with the exception of maybe lithograph screen printed pollsters have the most potential for collectability. This poster here was designed for Chuck Palaeozoic, the author of Fight Club and lullaby and other books like that. And this one is for his book called Brant was designed and printed by illustrator designer Kevin tongue. And it's hard to see. You can't really see, but down here it's actually a limited edition run of 200 prints and it's actually signed by the designer himself. The color, it might not be coming through on the actual video here, but I can tell you up close, this has got some really interesting color to it. It's actually a three color print on top of black paper, which kinda adds that fourth color just by adding a colored paper to your print. That's a technique you don't get to use. And a lot of other places because most places will not print on dark paper like this. You can't really print CMYK on black paper. It just won't work correctly. It's not made for that. Inks that they use on screen printing are made to sit on top of each other. Sometimes they're made for blending or overlay so you can get some coloration out of mixing two together. And more likely than not, the colors are meant to sit together. And if you really look at this closely, you can see he's done a really good job of adding texture to the piece so that it gives some dimensionality to it. Plus there's also a bunch of halftone in which is interesting technique in screen printing where they fake like fades and gradients by putting in dots where normally it would just be like a faded gradient. I think I said that two times psi from all the time it takes to actually screen print a poster. Screen printing can actually be one of the most costly ways of getting something printed. Because every time you add a new color to the print, the price goes up. And if I decide to post-surgical like that where it was meant to be three colors on top of a dark colored paper in front of about 200. Sent that to a print shop to do it for me. I would not be surprised if it came back to over $1000 to get those 200 posters printed between all the cost of the inks and the paper, the service fees, the things that they had to do at the print shop to actually get the files ready. It can be very costly, beautiful, but expensive. Now that the graph is not dissimilar to the screen printing except instead of laying down screens and then running paint over top of them, you're actually cutting out stamps for lack of a better term, than you're laying the paper on top of that and running like a, like a like a wheel, a wheel on top of it. And so that every time that we'll gets pressed, it's pressing down and that's pushing the ink up into the poster itself. Process of getting those stamps or plates made for lithography is incredibly expensive and that's why you don't see a whole lot of people using that technique anymore. But if you've ever seen a nice finally printed, professionally printed lithograph, you understand why some people choose that meant that because it really can't be a sight to behold now there is no one right or wrong way to get your stuff printed. You can go any particular direction you want. Now if you want something more beautiful than you're probably going to want to lean into the G clays or the screen printing or maybe the graph. If you've got that kind of money to throw around. And if you're thinking about doing screen printing or lithography, then you really need to consider your design as you're going because you can't just design as like you would just to lay out in whatever Photoshop or infinity photo of whatever app that you're using to create your thing, you have to think about the different colors. How am I designing for that particular color? If I reference that poster by Kevin Tong, he had the three different colors on that black paper. And so when he's thinking about his design, after he's illustrating, it's like, okay, I'm designing this one particular layer on my file to all be this one color. Does I need like that takes a little bit more of a different mindset because you really have to think locally to the different plates. So you think about how that's going to look and what color is each one going to be, even if you hand that file off to a print shop, they are going to dissect your file and say, Okay, well, I think that they want these things printed at this color and these elements printed on that color. And if you don't make that determination for them, then they'll make it for you and they may get it wrong. In other words, if you're thinking about screen printing well then you better really, truly understand how screen printing design works because you've got a lot of work to do before you get to the point of even hand in that file off to a print shop. If you think about going with offset printing or even digital, anything like that, I definitely recommend that you go get some sort of test prints made before you commit to the full bang of whatever it is, it's going to cost you to get your posters and you don't want to make a very costly, expensive mistake before checking your work first. And the very last thing and kind of almost to the contrary to all of that, just go get it done, finished the work, go get it printed. If you're just sitting there trying to noodle, trying to get the colors right, trying to get the design right, trying to get everything just perfect. Well then it's never gonna get done. So let's go print that thing. Shall we? What we got to design first? Let's go design something and then go print it. 6. Music Poster Concept: Okay, so let's get into our first design, shall we, the basic design brief, but this one, it's going to be a gig poster design for Kendrick Lamar and his new tour. You're not familiar with Kendrick Lamar. He is probably one of the most popular, one of the most well-known rappers out there. And he just released a new album after several years of being away from it. You also recently announced his big tour. I'm a big fan. I don't know if I'm gonna be able to go, but if I can't go, I'm gonna go ahead and design this fanbase poster. They're not hiring me to do this, but I'm going to design it anyway. First the parameters, I'm going to design this piece at 18 by 24 inches, which is a relatively standard poster size four, shows like this, there really are no rules about poster designs size. It's just a matter of like how much you can afford or how much you want to know, how big you want to make it versus how small you want to make it. That's totally up to you, but we're gonna go 18 by 24, which is pretty standard size for poster design. I'm not actually going to print this. I'm only going to design it with green print intentions in mind because even with that thinking, I can still produce a four-color piece if I wanted to, and it would still look pretty good. It's not going to have the same luster of a screen printed poster, but it will have the same relative aesthetics bonus. You get to see how I would think about doing a screen printed poster if I was gonna do, well, let's talk about concepting for a second now. I don't normally concept on paper. Typically my thing I personally prefer to concept in my head and then just execute on the page as I'm designing. That being said, this is opposed to class and you're not really going to learn anything by trying to dig into my head because you can't see that. So I'm just going to execute as much as I possibly can on paper. And then we'll, we'll illustrate as we go. But there are some limitations here. There. Here we have my handy-dandy notebook, one of my many notebooks. So these two pages are for the poster design and I really don't have a lot going on. This is about the fullest extent of my notes. Let's pay attention to this page here real quick. The album they just came out by Kendrick Lamar has called Mr. Brown and the big stepper is, when you get into it, it's really deep, It's super intense. It might even have some triggering aspects to some people because of all the topics that he discusses, his anxiety, his addiction, and the pandemic has relationship. It really is a very deep album and I think that it probably has probably a bit of a cathartic experience. It definitely feels like he was expressing himself and all the things that he's been feeling over the last few years in this particular album. Not that he doesn't do that anyway, but this one was really intense. So before I started taking notes, I turned on the album, I turned up the volume as much as I could when nobody was around in the house and I just started the listening, I would close my eyes and I would think about all the things that he was saying and just all these things that came out. Some things I already kinda new. I've been listened to this album a few times already. Hearing it like this really helped me kind of tap into some ideas. May want to generate themselves onto the poster pay. So I wrote down some words like anxiety, addiction and poetry. Time off back at it. Exploration, breaking rules, therapy, stigma, breaking stereotypes, broken, reborn, working on something, lost my way. Pandemic, sick, everything here obviously relating to sickness and health and mindset. I really feel like I want to tap into that idea. There's a lot of stuff going on in his head right now. I don't want to see if I can't capture that somehow within this poster design. This was my first initial sketch, and of course it's not meant to look anything like Kendrick, but it definitely has some sort of representation. I just kinda had this, this idea of like different sides of him or his head being split open. And originally what I had in here or what I was thinking was the brain. But as I started to draw this out, I put brain are broken heart. And he's he's dealing with some emotional stuff with its relationships as well. And so I thought maybe instead of a brain, it's actually a heart. Maybe it's a real heart or it's a like a, like a Valentine heart. I'm not 100% sure yet. But then I went over here and did this one was like a skull and similar. And these, these elements here are butterflies, which is actually a reference to one of his albums, a few albums back called to pimp a butterfly, which I kinda got the sense of like he's releasing some of these demons that he's got going on. I wanted to use that as if these butterflies were coming out of the cracked skull. I also was thinking like what if I had half the skull and half the face and didn't like that back to us and half k hat pays half skull, Hartford brain butterflies released. When I'm thinking about a design, I'm thinking about all the different ways that I can make a treatment to whatever it is that I want to do. So for instance, if I'm looking at these two elements here and I'm thinking to myself, I want it to be half base and half skull. I'm not just thinking about half of Kendrick space or half a sculpt, I'm thinking about how those things are applied. What's the texture going to look like? What's the distressing going to look like? What kind of elements are going to be included in that? What's the color? I can picture that in my head, but I can't necessarily equate that here on the page. It just doesn't come out the same way as in thinking about it. Now, here I've got a different type of notebook and this is where actually get a little bit deeper with my concept. So you can see something I like to do one occasion. I again, I don't do this all the time because I still cannot capture everything in my head in the page like this, but at least it gives it a little bit more of a tactical fields. So this is basically what I'm thinking here. I wouldn't expect it to the final version to look anything close to this, but it could be similar. We've got his name is written as Kendrick Lamar and have actually taken some hints from the current poster on the topography which will get executed better obviously once we get in there, Here's the two different halves, the skull and the face and then the heart in-between there. I didn't put the butterflies in because I kind of forgot about it to be honest with you, but I will get those in there. Originally, I was putting these lines in here just to kind of represent texts, but I decided to write in Mr. Morel and a big step right here. And then September 2022, which is when the constant is happening. Now, these little elements here on the page and the background graphically just elements that are gonna be there. But what I'm thinking is that there might be headlines about Kendrick, so I thought maybe I would incorporate those somehow. And then this thing back here is really just background, is just texture. And I want to figure out a way to see if I can create some sort of texture in the background without taking too much away from the rest of the design. Because like I said, what you see executed here on this page is not actually going to, the final version is not going to look a whole lot like this. It would be similar, but not a lot. And that's kinda the key point to what I'm saying is that sometimes what I do on paper is there to help me visualize things, but the things that are going on in my head as I'm even looking at this one right here. I know for a fact it's not gonna be the same. It's going to be a lot more elegant. Obviously, it's not gonna be nearly as rough and the colors are definitely not gonna be there. But at least I have a better understanding of where I'm going with. I know spatial relationships between the topography and everything. We will see how it plays out in the final version. Really, it's just a matter of just jumping in and getting into it. So let's jump in and get into it. 7. Poster Prep: Okay, You've been anxiously waiting for this part. We're gonna get into the design aspect of this project. Before we do that though, I got a couple of things that just a couple of little caveats, a little little notifications. The first and most important thing is that as I go through this process, I am going to be using assets that do not belong to me. We're talking about Kendrick Lamar here. He obviously retains the rights to all of his property. I don't have any rights to any of those things. Therefore, I can't actually share anything with you. The images that I have scraped. I can't give you that said they are available if you are industrious, I just cannot redistribute if you understand what I'm saying. The second half of that is that again, I'm not going to be doing anything with this poster beyond the scope of this class. I'm not gonna be selling this poster. I'm not going to be trying to promote this poster. It's strictly for our purposes here as a demonstration and maybe at some point down the road when we all progress and become the best poster designers ever. Kendrick Lamar will turn to one of us and say, you should design my next poster, even though you weren't supposed to be designing that first one, I cannot stress enough that if you are going to reproduce whatever it is that you design, that you make sure that you have Express permission to use whatever it is that is in that design. I can talk about copyright issues for a very long time, but we're not here to do that. Basically just make sure that you have all your bases covered. If you're going to use anybody else's image, anybody else's property. You're going to do any of that, make sure you have expressed permission to do so. Sorry, I'm not your lawyer. You're going to have to take care of yourself on this one that said there will be aspects of this video that I can't share with you, some elements of graphics that I can't share. And that will be linked below in a zip file for you to download and use to your leisure. Also, I'm gonna be using Affinity Photo for this particular project, but this particular project doesn't need to be done in Affinity photo. You can do this in Photoshop. You could do this in InDesign, you could do this in Affinity Publisher, you could do this in procreate. Probably. Maybe you could probably do this in procreate for any designer, Adobe Illustrator or Inkscape, even Canva. I mean, there's a number of different apps that you could use to build this poster. I'm not going to make it so complicated that it requires very specific elements that you can only use in Photoshop, that you can only use in photo that you can only use one of these programs. That's not how I operate. The stuff that I designed can usually be reproduced slightly different ways in all of these different programs. Affinity Photo just happens to be my program of choice when it comes to this type of stuff. Hey, take a look at the screen right now, I'm setting up my page real quick. And like I said, I'm gonna be using an 18 by 24-inch page 300 DPI inches. Of course, if you're not inches of your metric versus Imperial than adjust accordingly, you don't have to do 18 by 24. You could do 12 by 16, you could do 2436. You could do 11 by 14. I don't care. Just this is what I'm building. I'm gonna be working in RGB because again, I'm not going to get it printed and it really would like to see the full color of this thing as opposed to working in CMYK. If I was going to be getting it printed, I probably would switch this over to CMYK unless I was going to get it printed with some sort of print-on-demand company where they're doing a jQuery style print. And that's been printed with lots of different colors. And you can probably still get away with RGB and they would do the conversion for you and it comes up a lot better. Well, it's going to throw an a margin of 0.625 all the way round. Just to have, just as a guideline, some of this stuff might bleed off. I don't know. Oh, one other thing I forgot is that I am going to be designing this as if I was going to go get its green printed. Just to kinda show you how I would think about that process if I was going to actually get it printed out, actually going to get it printed. But if I was, this is how I would think about. So the first thing I want to look at real quick before we even begin is my colors because that is incredibly important to the screen printing process. Like what colors are you going to use for the design? Thinking back to the image that I created in the notebook about what the design looks like. I'm trying to keep in mind that the different colors that I might need for this particular piece. That's what I've got going in here on the screen is the color palette. Then I'm going to be using for this piece and I'm thinking About screen printing. I have to think about the colors that are gonna be involved in the print process. I can't use a bunch of colors. I'm not using a four-color process even though I've got four colors on the page, you know what I'm saying? I can't use the standard CMYK process not going to be an RGB process. It's going to be very specific to these particular inky colors. This is going to make more sense as we dive into it, but this red is obviously going to represent that heart image that I have within the design. And then any kind of maybe some, maybe some accents, some hints of red at different places. The yellow is gonna be the main color that kinda boosts all the other imagery or rounded, the black is going to obviously stand for black outlines and whatever textures I might put in some really heavy hitting spots that I need to put some deep, deep contrast in. And then finally, this blue, this blue isn't actually going to be printed. This blue represents the color of the paper that I would use for the poster itself. And so if I was to use a colored paper, then in essence what I have here is a four color design. And the trick will be to utilize that colored paper background, not just as background, but also find ways to incorporate negative space or empty spaces within the design that come through from the paper itself but incorporate into the overall design element. Also, if I was going to print on a colored paper, there has to be a compensation for what the other inks are going to do on top of that paper because this bright red and this bright yellow, we're not going to be quite as bright once I put them on that grayish blue paper, if I really was gonna get this printed, what I might consider is to take this red and this yellow and bring them up in saturation or lighten up the hue a little bit because I know that as soon as it hits that paper, it's going to darken up pretty quickly. By the way, this website here, It's called coolers.co. And it's basically just a way to generate color palettes. And they've got a bunch of different things you can use it for. It's mostly free, but they do have a pro version where you get extra added things like they removed ads and stuff like that. It's just a really cool way to kinda, you know, you can start the generator like what I did there. Or you can go and explore different palettes and you can make some adjustments. It's, it's kinda fun to play around with, but don't get too deep into it. Because sometimes you see these colors and the way they're justified here and you might put them into a design and it's doesn't quite work that well, but it's good to get the inspiration. Oh, and it's been a long time since I've ever spent any paper from any paper company. But when I used to use back in the day is French Paper Company. They can be a little bit on the pricier side, but they do make our high-quality product, but there are other options available. You may even want to talk to a printer to find out what they used, what they recommend. Especially if you're using any kind of color work for a poster, like a screen printed thing like that. If you're getting a postal printed in a different way, well then you may or may not have an option on what the paper is, but you can always talk to your printer and find it. Okay, So this video went on a little bit longer than I expected, but sometimes you gotta get the details out of the way. But now that the details out of the way, now we can really get to it. Okay, so, but we're gonna get to it in the next one. 8. Poster Design #1: Okay, nitty-gritty design time. Do you remember this concept? If you don't remember this and you need to go back and watch the concept videos. Because number one, it's got some good information that you're going to need to have for going forward. Number two, this is important, this layout as weird and crazy as it is, is important to what I'm about ready to tell you right now, but it won't have any contexts and let's just go back. And once I've video, one of the most important aspects of concepting is that you need to be flexible in how they actually turn out. Because you may have plans, you may have concepts, but once you get into the work, it doesn't quite work out the way you wanted it to, which is exactly what happened to me. Let me show you what I'm talking about. But the first thing I did is I jumped in and just started messing around with a typography. I put the name up there at the top where I wanted it to be. Then I put the essential information down here in these corners just to kinda see where things would go and how much space I would have for whatever it was I was going to put down. And then I started to develop some of the elements on the page. And as soon as I got to this point in this design, I realized this wasn't going to work out the way I wanted it to. It just isn't quite there. It definitely has an element to it that's interesting and kind of like almost antediluvian in aspects, but it's not where I wanted it to be and it didn't feel right. This layout felt like no matter how much energy I put into it, I wasn't going to get rewarded with something that was satisfied with, so I decided to scrap it. What actually ended up happening is there was a period while I was building this where something felt kind of interesting and cool Whenever I have those moments, what I would usually do is I will say an alternative version of the file because that might be something worth exploring as I go. And maybe some of that had to do with the fact that I've kind of fallen a little bit in love with that new idea as opposed to the idea that I was working on. And I just didn't feel good about this one anymore. Often this is just how things play out. You just kinda have to chase your inspiration and find out wherever it's going to take you, which is exactly what happened. I went from this over to this. Now of course I'm going to break down everything I did here for you. I'm not just going to say, Hey, look, here's the posterior. Okay, go do this, right? I'm not gonna do that day. I'm going to show you every aspect of the things that I did because there's elements here that I need to talk about. I just wanted to kind of show you the end result because I wanted you to anticipate where it was going, especially after you saw that I was doing this the first time. So stripping this down all the way to the base layer, the first thing I wanted to do was to add some texture. Now first I had this kind of wavy BCCI kind of thing going on, which is not dissimilar to this because that picture back there is actually like ocean or something like that. And that's kind of where I was going with it at first, Kendrick Lamar, california Born and raised. So the ocean has some correlation even though he was raised in Compton, which isn't exactly right next to the beach, but it's close enough. But the feeling of it just didn't feel right, didn't feel good. So I just scrapped it instead, what I did is I took a gritty old map and I laid that over. And you can see right here at the very top, Compton Boulevard. And these are the city streets that he grew up on. And I thought like this will be a really good, interesting background to the image. Now, I kinda had to come to that after I started building all the other things. Just wanted to show you that I did this because I wanted it to be gritty representation of where he's from. Maybe he wouldn't necessarily agree with associates himself with that right now. I don't know because he's kinda moved into a different place. But if you listen to some of his earlier music, he talks about Compton a lot. And so I figured it was a good opportunity for me to kinda put that in there because it's where it came from. Now, just like the first one I had dropped in the text, basically, essentially the same way. Vector just copied it directly from the other file. I brought this in pretty much the same way. I made the name a little bit bigger and kind of read it off the page a little bit. And originally I just had it as black. I was just going to have black type. But then as I started to build it, I decided, okay, well I'm gonna incorporate these other two colors. And again, we already talked about this in the last video, but this is the color palette I'm working from, and I'm using only those colors in this design. Then I found this slightly older picture of Kendrick and had the kind of vibe that I was looking for from him. He just had this very somber, not smiling, even though this was like a like a like a red carpet event. It just felt like he wasn't going to convey any emotion than just like songbirds stoically, I don't know. I don't know what phrase you would use to explain that. Look, now of course we're not using any white in our design now remember our color of their paper is gonna be blue. So anything that's going to be white has to show up as blue. So I just changed my blending mode to multiply on that. Now those map lines are not gonna do it for us. What I did is I drew another shape and color it the same color as the background just to kind of fill in his face. I did keep it down here in his neck line because I kinda wanted to give this sense of like this is part of him. The streets are part of who he is. And I think it worked out well because you can still see the shadow from like his shirt and Liggett, his neck line or whatever. So it kinda feels like it gives it some three-dimensionality. Is that a word? It feels like it's actually sitting on his chest. Next day I went over to my shapes tool and I just drew in a heart. And this one actually took me a little while to get right. Like it just kinda had to massage it. Like try to figure out where the right spacing was for all this stuff. Of course, you can see it's a heart right now, but as soon as I put that skull image on top of it, it kinda got hidden, so I kinda had to play with it a little bit, move it around, see what works best. Now this skull image I got from a Fair Use project called crap pounds big book of unhappiness. And I go back here to the back page as it looks very heavy, so it's a little bit cumbersome, but you can see it right down here in the corner, right down there, but it's all skulls on this one page. This is a fun page. I like this paper, but this whole book is filled with all kinds of like crazy. Illustrations, It's just interesting stuff and it's all vintage and supposedly all fair use. But sometimes that's up for debate. I figured I've altered it enough that it would be. Okay. It would be okay. And this skull image will actually be included in the documents belong. But just like most of everything else that I'm doing here, I just took my image and overlaid it on top of my solid color and then took my original image and just multiplied that. So I have my solid color of yellow, which is essentially just a duplicated version of the white one and where some areas that have been erased and reversed out. And then I just overlaid the white and black one and just multiply that out. So now we're starting to get someplace, but it still feels a little bit empty specifically down here. Now it's kinda hard to tell by this image right here, but you can kinda see a little bit of a gold chain hanging. So I just painted a gold layer underneath it. Nothing fancy. I didn't do any kind of clipping and didn't do any pen drawing. I just painted. It, didn't have to feel like super authentic and didn't have to feel perfect. In fact, I might even go back in here and this edge right here and just kinda add a little bit more to it because it just looks a little bit wrong. It looks a little bit rough right here. And I think that's because what I'm actually seeing here, which isn't getting captured because of that map image back there. But what I'm actually seeing here is the t-shirt lines and it's kinda running up against the chain. So the chain is kinda like slightly underneath there. I can just go in and just add a little bit of paint brush back. Let's just do it. That's just do right now I'm going to add a little bit of paint brush right now. So it's not super great. But what I could do is I come in here, maybe clone or copy some of these elements on these edges down here at the bottom of the neck was kinda create more of that depth of that edge. The jewelry is kinda wrapping underneath. I could do that if I wanted to, but I'm not terribly interested. It's not so important because again, not printing this, this is for our purposes. But if I was going to be printing this, I would definitely go in and do a little bit more finer detail on that one. Somebody else's, Kendrick has got some nice soft eyes. And so I thought, I don't want to necessarily hide that. It's being blocked out by the red. So I just decided to put it in a little curve here, a little, a little color, just brighten up as eyespot there. We've got this depth going on. It's the blue is in the background, the yellow is kinda sitting on top of that. And it just kinda feels all wrapped around and feels real. It feels human now. And then something that's a bit of an element for me. It's something I felt was appropriate for this particular situation was I tend to put stars around. Maybe that's a cliche thing. I don't know, but it's something I do because I put a little star on Kendrick because I thought, well, he's a star now. He's one of the greatest rappers of all time and it just kinda felt like appropriate plus it also gives a little bit more depth like there's something else sitting in front of that. I just to kinda create a different bit of interests in that region. Maybe it works, maybe it doesn't feel as good to me, so we're sticking with it. I do like how it's underneath the word Lamar here because it just gives more depth. Because obviously that star is on top of his face. And if the star is on top of his face than the word Lamar is on top of that. It just kind of creates this illusion of depth. Now let's talk about the typography for a second, starting with the name of top. As you can see, I kinda mixed my typefaces together. Helvetica bold kinda dominates the majority of the typography on this page, but I did add a little bit of interests do it by putting in these black letter letters at the very beginning of the k and the l here, those are cloister black and they did that because if you go to the official poster for this tour, you will see that what they've done here with the typography is they've used a bunch of different letters in different ways. So it's kinda like, it's almost got a little bit of like old school punk rock put the letters together kind of thing. What I leaned into is these black letters here and here and here. So the idea here was to kinda pull a little bit from that, but obviously still keep it authentic to me as the design. Because if I really had my way, I'd probably just use Helvetica, but I do like how the black and the Helvetica kind of work together in this particular situation. What I don't like is that these letters are kinda get lost a little bit. You just can't quite 100% make out what they're trying to say. Of course, the purpose of this poster would be that they would be sold at the concert itself. So if you're at the concert than you already know who you're seeing. So it's just automatic. It just be one of these things like of course they get it sometimes you don't have to be so instructive. Sometimes you can fudge the lettering a little bit because people already understand what the things about. So they take it in stride. They appreciate the art that went into it. They don't worry about it having to say Kendrick Lamar so vividly that they can read it every time they look at it and when it's hanging on the ceiling above their bed. Well, you don't hang your posters on the ceiling above your bed? I felt like I needed to do something about that. It felt like it needed to differentiate those letters just to kinda make them stand out a little bit. So of course what I did is I threw a black outline on it. Leeches. What I tend to do with lot of time, I don't know. It's okay. It doesn't feel great. It feels a little bit too strong. And so it just started to play. I tried it a few different colors. In fact, they tried it in blue. I'll show what that looked like. That wasn't working for me. So instead decided to incorporate the colors that were already there. And it looks pretty good. I don't know. I really like this as soon as I did it I was like depth. This works. It gives the letters depth. It's not much of a stretch as far as color wise. It's not so overwhelming like the black would be. It just felt Good As soon as I did that. And at this point I figured I'm done, but as I sat on it a little bit of that. Well, what if I tried to add a texture on top of that? This is the tricky part because you don't want to go to none because you don't want it to steal away. Now one thing I could do is I could do a mask of a texture and then pull some of that blue back, which I tried but it didn't love. Instead, what I did is I created a halftone image. It feels like a comic book with the half tone on top of it a little bit gray. Just like this works too. I had it laid out halftone all the way across the entire page and I thought it looked pretty good except for one aspect when I lay it over top of everything, it just kinda flattened everything out and kind of created this haze on top of everything all the time and energy that I spent trying to create depth in the image was lost. Everything just looks flatter now and that was like I wasn't I wasn't satisfied with that. So what I did is I took the original letters and I just mask those out completely. And then on the ones behind the bigger, thicker outline behind that, I just reincorporated the color scheme. I just flipped it again on the yellow, I put the red. On the red, I put the yellow. It just creates more depth that you don't get when you overlay black over everything because I liked how that looked. I took the type that's down here and brought that to the very front too. Because then I thought, okay, again, creating more depth by letting that sit on top of everything that's already been trying to get flattened, but don't want that to flatten want that to feel like there's some distance there. Now I don't know about you, but I'm very happy with the result. I would gladly display this poster up on the wall, especially if I made it, I would definitely hang that up on the wall and I would hope that some of you would want it to, but I'm not gonna do that because I don't have any rights to use this image of Kendrick. Hopefully he sees it. It says thumbs up and doesn't give me a cease and desist. But still, I appreciate him. I appreciate his music. I appreciate the opportunity to do something like this. I wish I could go to the concert. I don't know if I'm gonna be able to get to now. I love that I got to spend time on this and I hope you enjoyed it too. Now, this one being done, we can push it out of the way. You can make room for the next poster that we're going to do. But before I do that, I want to talk about how I would take this particular design and turn this into something you would get sent to a printer for screen printing, It's not as complicated as you think. And hopefully that opens you up to opportunities to do that in the future, if that's what you want to do. 9. Thoughts on Screenprinting: We finished our poster design that we definitely want to send it off to his green printer to get printed. If I were to just send this to the printer, just as is, they probably laugh me out the door or the result that I would get back from them after getting it printed wouldn't look anything like what I'm looking at here because I didn't prep my file the way it should if I just flattened this and sent it off to them, they'd be like, What is this bile, this doesn't work for us. Things have probably changed since the last time a screen printed a pollster and technologies probably gotten a little bit better. The printers have probably gotten a little bit more savvy about how to incorporate designs with people who might be more novice when it comes to printing. But I think it's a good practice to set up our files in an inappropriate way so that the printers, number one, they feel good because you've done the good hard work to get it ready for them. And number two, it creates less opportunity for floods, less opportunity for error when you set up your file in a proper way so that there's less risk of them messing it up. So what we need to do is we need to isolate all of these colors. All of the reds need to be on one layer. All of the goals need to be on one layer. All of the blacks would need to be on one layer. Because if you think about how screen printing works, they basically take a plate or a screened for every single color they laid on top of the poster. They put the ink down and then they pull it across and they're not going to pull one thing of gold and then put another thing in red and then put it another thing of gold. And then maybe put some black and then put some more gold and then put some more red. That's not how it's gonna get done. It's gonna be one of each color, maybe two, depending on exactly what color you're using and how the color fastness is on top of the paper. But even if it is two hits or more, they're going to do those at the exact same time. They're not going to go back and do it again. Now I can't speak for all printers on this one, but my assumption of the order of colors that they would use on this particular poster would be gold first, then red, then black. It's most likely going to be lightest color first, then darker than darkest. I could be wrong. You'd probably want to talk to your printer about that. And the reason you'd probably want to talk to your printer about that is because they do a thing called trapping. Trapping is basically when you have multiple colors on a print run like this. And you know that some of those colors are going to touch. That printer is going to have to negotiate the, the design that you've created and make it so that they'd not just touched, but kinda come on top of one another. You don't want them to be just flush. Because of just flush that leaves an opportunity for a hallowed missed print area. So they kinda have to overlap one or the other depending on the color. I'm going to zoom in here for a second so I can illustrate exactly what I'm talking about here. That the yellow and the red and the yellow and the red and so on and so forth. And the reason that it's important to understand that is because each printer might have a different opinion about how they want to operate. That one printer might want to knock out the yellow from all of the red so that there's definitely a delineation every time those two colors come together. The other option for the printer would be to take both of those red and yellow layers and combine them into one. And then that would become the new yellow layer underneath the red. So they print big solid swath of yellow. And then the red goes on top of that. The reason that's good is because less likely chance of having any kind of Halloween. But nothing is like, you know, kinda barely touching everything is sitting on top of itself. And the downside would be that once you lay that yellow down, it's going to affect the color of the red on top of it. Anytime you put one color down and then you put another color down, it's going to change the color that's sitting on top. So the printer did that where they put that big swath of yellow gold and then laid the red on top of that, that red might actually come out a little bit more orange than you expect if you're a stickler for color, then I highly recommend what you do is you take a copy of your file, you send it to the printer, have them take a look at it and then let them advise you about how you should handle managing that. If you're lucky, they'll tell you, oh, yeah, we'll just take this and we'll get it figured out for you. That's definitely not going to happen all the time. Some print shops won't do that for you. And if they decide not to do that for you, whether it's in your best benefit to learn how to handle these files in the right way so that you can just send it to them and they're like, Okay, great, You did a great job with the file, will take care of it from here. But if you do find a print shop that will do all of that hard work for you and actually print out really great posters. Well then that's their gold. You better hold onto them like your life depended on it. But of course, if you're not going to screen printed posters, you just gonna get imprinted traditionally like an offset CMYK or RGB, then you're already ready to go send it off and get down with your bad self. Let's move on to the next one. 10. PM 11 Poster2 Concept FINAL: So you may or may not know this, but I run a company called superlative.com and it's spelled SPR of TB. It looks like this. Now while I've been making digital assets for awhile, so privileged.com, it's actually a relatively new business. In fact, it just started in May of 2022. If you've known me for any amount of time, then you know that I'm the one that jumps into projects headfirst without having to worry about all the other things that need to come along with it in order to make it look cool. I designed a logo, I designed a website, and that was it. I didn't go into it trying to figure out all of the different branding opportunities that I needed before I started. I just started. I definitely worry about getting started more than about branding and marketing and all that stuff. That stuff usually comes later. Well, today is later because not only am I going to be designing a poster, but I'm going to be designing one that happens to also be the beginning of the brand identity for superlative.com. So the elements that I placed into this poster will carry over into other things. I don't know exactly what that means yet, but they're gonna be branding opportunities. And I'm going to use some of the elements that I've designed into this poster In those things later, I'm not going to design all of those things here. That would be an entirely different course, but we'll talk about it. That's a good point. Would you take a course about how to design your own brand identity for yourself for whatever business that you wanted to create a force. If so, go down to the comments below and let me know, maybe that'll be the next course that I designed. So here's the very beginning of our poster and of course, there's my logo. I'm not sure how I'm going to represent the logo yet. I kinda have this instinct to use it really big and bold because I want it to be a signature point. But I also have this thought that when I create some sort of abstract graphic that becomes the focal point of our brand identity, at least for whatever the first season, I don't know what you'd call it. It'll be something that I might want to rotate over time, as you can see on the website, the tagline is digital assets for bold creativity, which is absolutely something I wanted to incorporate into this design. We want stuff that really kinda shocks to the eyeballs, makes people go, Wow, That's what we're about. That's the point of superlative. And that's kinda, the idea is that we're going to be incorporating into this poster, whatever I make definitely has to be a very bold visual. But if you know how I work, then you know that that's not a problem. But before I go in and want to kind of get some inspiration for layout ideas. So we're gonna go head over to design inspiration or common. Now, keep in mind, I'm not here to try and steal somebody else's identity. I'm not trying to steal somebody else's concept of their poster. I'm just kinda looking at placement of things and how things are balanced in whatever is being shown on the page. We're just looking at this first page right here. This Rolling Stone cover is obviously incredibly chaotic and not exactly what I'm looking for. I want something that has some chaos to it, but also has some breathing room. Now of course, I love this one right in the middle because it is a poster designed by David Carson for a talk that he gave. I've given him plenty of love and attention, so we'll skip that one. Now I found this one and I clicked on it and I really enjoyed this piece because it's like at first it just looks like abstract colors. But obviously when you get closer to it, you can see that there's models in here showcasing whatever it is they're showing. I'm not sure if it's the outfit or the shoes or whatnot, but I really liked this poster. However, again, it's still a little bit too chaotic for what I'm trying to go for it. But as I scroll down from here and notice that there's a lot of designs in here that really got my attention. Like, I really like this one, but it might be a little too minimalist. I definitely like what's going on here, but it might be a little too structured. This one's kind of fun. I like that. I really dig this, whereas these fragmented pieces of things, I think that that's an interesting concept to take into effect because like we can take the abstract aspects and then cut them up into shapes to create some sort of new shape with them. I really like this. Save the date card is obviously some sort of notification for a wedding, which is atypical because sometimes weddings can be so cliche with the swoopy fonts and all that. And they've done the exact opposite. In fact, what they've using future here I'm guessing is the main typeface plus some san-serif fonts or whatever. But I really liked the layout. I like that there's a corner of information up here, corner of information down here, the main information here plus this, these flowers which create this abstract. The separation of things is really kind of what I'm going for. And it just really comes down to, okay, what do I want to say in this particular poster that I'm going to make today, that not only gets my point across in this poster, but I can also turn around and use in other ways, in other things. Again, not going to copy this layout at all, just using it as a, as a, as an idea generator for whatever I'm gonna do next. What I'm gonna do next is go to unsplash.com and find myself in image as a jumping off point for our design. Now I want something that's got a lot of big bold color in it, but I don't want too much because then it's just gonna become a hot mess. This one here is really cool looking, but there's just way too many colors going on. This one, probably two, I kinda dig this one here, but it's not quite the color scheme that I want. That's okay Really Because I can bring this into the app and then just change the color scheme as I wanted, just using hue and saturation. Let's do it. I don't know, That looks pretty good right there. Maybe I'll just leave it at that. Hey, thanks very much guys. I appreciate you. I'll see you next time. I'm just kidding. Of course, someone to do something more than that. I mean, I could leave it just like this because all it takes sometimes it's a really good image to make a dull pollster a little bit less doll or a little bit more interesting. We're not going to leave it that we're going to take it even further, but that's for the next video. See you over there. 11. PM 12 Poster2 Design 01 FINAL: Jumping into it. Let's go ahead and get rid of the logo just for the moment. I don't need it right now, we're just going to focus on this image here. If you're working in Affinity Photo or you're working in Photoshop, it doesn't really matter. Nothing that I do here is going to be exclusive to either one of these apps. Of course, I'm working in Affinity Photo, so it's, nothing I do here is gonna be exclusive to Affinity Photo. Everything can be reproduced in Photoshop, although we're not talking about different techniques, we're not talking about how to do this particular thing versus that particular thing. There are ways around everything. And I'm going to keep my design relatively simple. I'm not going to use some crazy techniques just to accomplish what I need to account, might not be able to walk you step-by-step on how to do a particular technique in Photoshop, it is achievable and it's not difficult. And if you really had questions about that that I could possibly answer, I'll do my best. I have. It's been a while since I've used Photoshop, but I'll do my best. But even though I'm working digitally, my style is very analog in nature and basically use the same techniques for my work for the last 20, some odd years. Now the first thing I wanna do is I want to change the hue and saturation of this poster because these aren't quite the colors I want to go with. If you go back to the website, you'll see a lot of primary colors, a lot of cyan and magenta, yellow and black, and then some bold reds. Everything's really bold, bright colors, but definitely not in this color spectrum right here. So I'm just gonna put a hue and saturation adjustment layer. You can do this in affinity. Obviously you can't be done in Photoshop. It's not that difficult. It's easy to find. I'm sure it'll be easy. The point is just to change the color until I find something that looks a little bit interesting. I don't necessarily want all those greens. I definitely want to capture more blues and reds. This is cool, but I think I'm going to create a secondary one on top of this and mask out some of these other areas and change those colors up even more. So I've selected the pink and purples of this external area, part of the design, I'm going to add a secondary hue and saturation on top of the other one. And then that should mask different colors on top of that. That's crazy. Well that's crazy. That's a lot of thought. A green, That's not what I want. I want more reds and blues. I don't know if I'm gonna get it. Can I get there? I think maybe this is going to work here because I still kinda have the warmer, cool, warm, cool tones. I don't know what you'd call a purple. Is it a warm or is it a cool tone somewhere in between? I like this, This will work for it. I know a lot of people would tell you to not work destructively to make sure you keep copies or have smart layers in your Photoshop or whatever. But I like to destroy things because it just creates like a no turning back situation that I just have to compensate for it. I'm going to do it. I can flatten this sucker out right there and we rasterize that layer. Now it is what it is. Now if you're in Photoshop, you would use the transform tool for this. But I'm using what's called the mesh Warp tool. And I'm just going to tweak this until I find something that's interesting and cool. So I'm just going to bring this one down here. Maybe bring this one up here. And already it's really looking pretty interesting. I can move these nodes like that. It looks almost like a holiday candy with the cellophane wrapper here. The ones that you'd see your grandma's house that you're not allowed to eat chosen for the guests. Maybe I do have a little family psychosis going on. Leave me alone to apply. That. Looks pretty cool. I kind of dig that, but it's it done? I don't think so. Not yet. I'm going to Command and click my layer because what I want to do is create a selection around that because I'm gonna come in here with my filters. I'm going to blur that. It's gonna do a Gaussian blur. And I'm just going to blend those colors a little bit more together, de-select it, but then go back in and do that same thing with the warp mesh tool and do it all over again, except we're gonna go a different direction with this way. Like this. I will go that way. I know I'm getting really cocky shape right now and that's okay. As if this isn't working, I can always will never want. I could go back number two, I can just keep adding more. I can add another one in here like this. Definitely looking a little crazy. Let's rotate this a little bit, see if I can get something interesting happening here. This is the pinch, peel, twists, yank, manipulate, massage, wow, well, in all kinds of crazy like that, pretty cool, but we're not done because I'm going to duplicate that layer Command J or duplicate however you wanna do it selecting the bottom one, I'm gonna just going to rotate it, change the shape a little bit. And we're going to merge these two. Kind of want to have the colors contrast each other a little bit. I also don't want to share, like you see how this line is popping up here and this line is popping up here. I don't necessarily want that. So we're gonna have to find a way to keep that color around. But not necessarily like maybe it's something like that to bring these, to bring them down a little bit size, I'm going to group those together and then flatten that one. And we'll just do that one more time. This is getting pretty wild right here. I'm gonna see what happens if I do this. A little bit of a crash, little bit of a crash, a little bit of a system error, whatever I did just a minute ago, didn't get it didn't keep I'll go ahead and read restaurants. So two again, we'll try again. Don't crash, don't crash didn't go where I wanted it to go, but that's okay. In fact, I think what I'm gonna do, I'm gonna back up a little bit to duplicate this and hide this one. Now, I'm just gonna do that same exact process, but I'm gonna make sure I keep this other one because I wanted to kind of rally off each other a little bit, but I did like the effect that it came up with. It just was taking too much away from the design. So what I'm getting from this right now is this kind of like almost like flower petals fallen off of something? If I bring this in here, obviously, it's big and it takes over everything. What if I moved it around a little bit, or what if I move these a little bit more? Now this hard edge here is a little weird, but that's okay. In fact, I kinda like that hard edge there, but I think I'm going to change it up just a little bit so that maybe this corner kinda ties in with this line here and move these over a little bit. And now I'm going to select just this one pedal for lack of a better term, I'm gonna cut this out and then paste it back in right where it belongs. Now I'm just gonna do it on a mesh right on that one itself. I'm going to bring it just so I can get that line relatively similar to what I've got going on here. But I'm trying to do is kinda create a little bit of a curve so that it kinda has like a wave that kinda leads down into this line. Maybe that's a bit ambitious. I don't know. We'll see, I don't know if it really changed too much, but I kinda dig it, so I'm going to group that together and the whole thing is huge. It's probably bigger than I need. Fact, I know it's bigger than any because I look at this, I noticed that it's definitely, the colors are cool, but there's definitely something missing from it. And I think it needs some more contrast because obviously these colors are all in the same relative piu. I think that if I just add more black and white, it's going to be interested in fact it by just throwing the logo real quick. You can see that just creates a visual interests like, just like that. Like I said in the last video, we have to be careful with black because we use too much of it. It really kinda steals away from everything else on the page. I'm not gonna be putting the logo in there just like that. That's not how it's going to roll, is definitely needs to be something. And I've got some thoughts. One of the things that I was thinking about is adding a bit of an editorial field to this poster, like giving it some depth beyond the fact that it's just a poster up on the wall again, some sort of elements. And one of those elements that I want to include is actually the superlative is all about, I'm going to take the information that I have on the website like say, on the front page, I've got some information on the about page, I've got some information and I'm going to incorporate that in here as if it was like clippings from a newspaper. And there'll be just part of the layout fact. I'll show you what I'm talking about. You scroll down, you see this spot right here where it says, What if we all just stop playing the game? And this is kind of like information that gives you the gist of what my thinking was when I started the website. If you click through this, takes you to the About page which kind of expands on this idea. All of this stuff essentially leads you to the concepts behind his brother Dave. What it's about what we stand for. And I want that to be represented in this poster. So what I'm gonna do is I'm going to take these pages and I'm actually going to print them out and then I'm going to do some distressing of them and then scan the backend, ring them into the layout itself. Actually, I lied, I'm not gonna do that. I'm not going to print anything out because I just remembered my wife broke our printer over the weekend. So we're going to have to do this a different way. 12. PM 12 Poster2 Design 02 FINAL: So I went and took some time to put all of my texts into a column layout so that I can chop everything up evenly and mess around with it, pulls some type of parts. While I was doing that, I played around with something that I wanted to show you some. We have our flower, whatever you want to call this thing went in and mess with the hue and saturation to get it really dig this color scheme. And I think this works better, especially once I dropped the logo on top of it, I feel like that, boom, this works, this works better. This feels better for me. However, I'm not going to eliminate these color schemes because this might actually work for something else down the road. And this could just be something that gets tied together. This kind of universal gradient glob or whatever you want to call it. I even separated all of those smaller petals into different little elements. I individualized every single one of them so that I can bring those in into different places too. This is all going back to the branding thing. So if I decided to make something smaller that needed just a little bit of the elements of what I've got going on here than it can do that with these little elements versus the big element that might take up too much space. So if like, let's say I wanted to make a business card, I just wanted to have these petals in here like this and then type in my type and they just say, there you go, There's a business card and it still gets the point across of what I was trying to create in the poster or wherever else I decide to use, but I digress back to the poster. That's why we're here for the poster right now. I'm going to duplicate all of those flower layers. I'm going to make a new layer, and then I'm just going to rasterize that one. This is one solid element and then we can twist and terror distressed this as much as we want. Let's go ahead and go back up here to this body copy real quick first you can see that it's obviously transparent background. And what I wanted to do was give it a little bit of a paper texture. So I do have some paper textures over on superlative product is called tender and it's a bunch of different paper textures that are found in the neighborhood. In fact, they actually came all from one source and they've been invaluable to me because I use paper textures a lot, but I don't know if this is going to fill the whole space. In fact, I know it's not it's not quite big enough for an 18 by 2400 poster, but that's okay. We don't need to be perfect or it's going to bring that down right underneath there. And that's pretty good. But I obviously, everything's kinda gotten hidden so we need to adjust our levels on this paper. So I'm gonna do Command L, bring up my levels, bring down my gamma a little bit, maybe bring my black up just a tad just to create the contrast. And then bringing the white more. I want the texture to be there, but I also wanted to kinda fade into the white areas of the background. Like if we zoom in here, I wanted to fade in more together because I don't want it to look too much like there's a delineation. I wanted to kinda feel like it's definitely bleeding a little bit more into each other. That's why I'm bringing my gamma way down, but it's still want to maintain some of that texture because I don't want it to feel like it's just It's just white. I want it to feel like there's something there. Now in Affinity Photo, when you bring in an image like a JPEG or some other image, it's gonna be a non-destructive image like you have to rasterize it in order to make it merge these two layers. I'm going to have to make it a pixel layer as opposed to an image layer. I'm just going to group them together like this and then I'm going to rasterize them together at this makes it easier for me to kinda cut and paste, chop it up, move things around. So I've got this layer group and I've already got it there. So I'm just going to rasterize this one. And I did that because I could have left them independent so they can move the type around and move the paper around independent. But I thought to myself, like if this really was printed on paper and I decided to cut some of this out. Like if it was like doing a cut and paste thing for real, you would get that sense of the paper being moved and shifted because the texture would have been moved. Them texture didn't stay in the same place as the text move. You want that texture to move, or at least I want that texture to move. I wanted to do that. I would do it like this. So I'm going to cut it and paste it back in. And maybe the texture maybe didn't show up that much. But you can kinda see that there's a shift in the texture. Especially obviously if you go over here to the edge, There's obviously a shift in texture in this area right here. It's subtle, but it's there. I'm going to bring this down just a tad because I don't want to bring it down in size, but I don't know what I'm gonna do with it just yet. In fact, I'm going to hide it for the time being and just kind of play around with well, actually, no, I take it back. I'm not going to hide it. I'm not going to hide it. What I am going to do, I'm going to take the opacity down a little bit because what I want to do with the background here is I want to shift some of those things. Remember back when I was talking about concepts and trying to figure out layout whatnot. I still wanna do this thing where I shift this shapes around. So I'm going to cut and paste a lot of these and ask maybe post and paste them right back where they belong or write back onto each other so much. And I've got several different layers all stemming from that same thing. And this way I can manipulate them, move them as I see fit. I don't know if this is going to work well, but we're gonna give it a shot. This just feels like the right direction for me. And I'm also not gonna be afraid pulling something away like this one. Maybe it needs to come down here like this or up, but creates some space if that one's like that. And I'm not afraid to turn them around to that. Nobody said I had to keep that shape. Maybe I rotate it like that. Maybe even tried to enlarge it a little bit. And when they bleed together here, I don't want to linear, but I'm gonna bring in the logo. I'm going to create a duplicate of that because that obviously you don't want to ruin that because in case I need to use it again and this one, it would bring down kind of in alignment with this space here. Now aside from the name itself, superlative and then obviously the texture paper that I've got going on here with this information, I definitely need some information in regards to what this is all about. Obviously, it's Sperling did but where superlative.com and what is it all about? And you can see I added that text down their digital assets for both creativity. With the domain right down there, I was considering, I might add maybe some other things like where to find us on Instagram or whatever. I don't know. I haven't decided that yet. I might want to keep it as clean as possible. That seems to be pretty clean because obviously I'm gonna be interrupting a lot of what's happening on the page with this stuff here. Now being a big block like this, it's kinda, it's a little too much going on. So what am I do is I'm going to cut and paste some of these just to break them up a little bit. Now three different layers, all independent information. It's not all going up there. So I need to figure out what of this information is going to stay and what's gonna go. And I'm just going to want to self edit a little bit here. Okay, I bet it had everything down. I got to the core aspects of what Sperling live is all about. Really honed the subject matter for this piece. If I wanted to go deeper, but wanted to create another editorial piece that had more depth. And then I could do that and still kind of incorporated this imagery for this. I think it works, but now I just kinda have to massage where everything goes. Just kinda have to move things around to see what looks best. I think there is something about the fact that this is almost dead center. I'm not a 100% sure that the whole thing needs to be that way, but I do kinda dig it and I'm also moving around some of these pieces behind here because I think I want to create some tension with that as well. I feel like I want to make this one bigger and I almost want to mess with it back-and-forth a little bit bigger, smaller, bigger, smaller, bigger, smaller. They really get some distress out of it. Now it's looking a little fuzzy, which is exactly what I wanted. Because what I'm gonna do with that is threshold, but a little threshold in your life because it makes everything well, more contrast, ie I'm sorry, bugs. I told you we're going to beep up that threshold. That snapping is driving me snappy. I'm getting snapping, snapping and move this just a massage, tiny, tiny, tiny little bit, just a tiny bit. Just as this is the last video and the whole series, I'm a little punchy. This for a little bit more visual interest to kinda carried some of that over here like this. And over here, I'm gonna take this one over here, tiny little bit of this, not the whole thing. I'm going to take this one and I'll make that a little bigger, like cut this. I'm going to paste that one in there like that and rotate it. And I'm going to do this, okay, camera die. Don't know how much you miss, but basically what it is did some trimming and trapping, moving, some grooving, and doing some things and such. In fact, what I'm gonna do this, I'm gonna go crazy with it. I've just, you know, sometimes you just gotta do random random stuff, get to it, work. There we go. I think that works. I think that actually adds a little bit of visual interests. That's kinda cool. It's something cool, it's something interesting. It feels good. It's not overwhelming. It gets the point across. There's this one little aspect of this and I think I can fix it easily. But you see how this thing is lined up here and this is not lined up to that. I don't know if I need to line that up, but I do want I don't want it to be weird. I'm a bit of a grid designer, but I'm also a bit of a radical designer. I'm gonna do whatever I want, put stuff wherever I want. I'm going to break the grid right. But I don't like it when it's not on the grid. But also like kinda close to the grid. It should be grid, but it's not, and it's not far enough away to make it interesting. It's just far enough away to be irritating. So what I'm gonna do, take all of these elements here and move them down. Just a tad little nudge. I'm looking at it as it's related in relationship to the logo right there. Just kinda Watson where that border goes, right maybe right there. So it's grid ish, but not on the grid. Okay, so now my instinct here is again to throw a texture on top of this, just kinda like hit it with a texture of some sort. I don t think I'm gonna do that. I think I'm gonna leave it as is even this, even the background back here. I think I feel like that's kinda weird. I don't know about that. What is this? Okay. So that little that little thing irritates me to add. I think I might trim this up. Let's trim that one up. Grabbed my little handy-dandy little, whatever this thing is. I don't need that much. I want a little bit of that. I don't want it all slice a little piece off their slice. Little, little, little, little. I like it. I think it looks good. Could it be cool with a texture on top? Let's just, just for our purposes, just so we can say we were right or we were wrong. I'm going to take a layer. I'm going to put it up here, up top. I'm going to fill it with about 50%. Greg, change that to overlay and the blending modes. And then I'm going to add a crap load of noise resume. And just so you can see how much noise we're adding, get the noisy noise. Very noisy. I'd say about 85 or four. That's good enough. There's a little visual something going on there. If I didn't like it totally, I can always bring it back down with the opacity. Let's keep it at 50 for now, just so we can see what's happening. And then let's let's see. I'm going to take it off and turn it back on. I'm going to zoom out, actually going to go 100%. Looking at 100%, I want to see how this Beals and come down here. I'm going to turn it off. Turn it back on. You know, I I kinda like it when it got ligand. I'm looking in here, like look at, look at this space right down here with the gradient, the blur. I turn it off. It's kind of okay. But when I turn that on it, that makes it look a little bit interesting. So maybe just a little bit of noise just to give it some visual interests, especially in the gradient, or is there something else I'm gonna do? I'm gonna go ahead and I'm going to group all these together. This is all the lettering except for the logo. So I'm gonna go up and I'm going to add a new life Filter sharpen. I'm going to unsharpened mask and I'm going to put it just on the type. And I'm gonna zoom in here, say Bruce, my threshold up about 1%, put my radius of about 25 is where it is my magic number here. And then I play with my factor and it kinda adds to that texture. It's complemented by the noise texture that I threw in there, 100%. Let's see how that went and let's turn it off. Turn on. Okay, So it really boosted up the texture a little bit. So maybe I need to back that off just a tad. I think it's too much. Take it up to like 1.5 factor of 1.5. Turn it off, turn it on. Okay, So it's just sharpen up. I think this works, I think this works. And this would be a really good promotional poster that if I wanted to share with people going to give it to people, do something with it. They might appreciate, they might enjoy it. I don't know. You tell me there's a comment section down below. You tell me, does this post your work or does it fail? I want to hear your thoughts. Please explain it. I will choose whether to listen to you or not. And again, like I said before, I can take all of these elements either complete, individual, separate, or as they are, as they are right here. And use them in all the different marketing materials that I'm going to produce in the future. Maybe you should be subscribing to my YouTube channel because that's likely we're going to talk about it or I'll talk about it. And of course, I don't know. I'm just rolling the dice at this point. I don't even know. I don't even know. It's always surprised either do both of us and you know, it also was a surprise. This is it. You're done, you finished. Well, almost. There's one more video once you go watch that one. 13. You Did It!: You go, if you follow it along you now you have two new poster designs under your belt and a little bit more experienced about how posters well can be operated. This is only one way, well, two ways really, but this is only a couple of different ways to operate in this scope of poster design. Like I said in the beginning, you can do whatever you want in this space. Well, almost anything you want in this space. But the important part is that you get to explore. You get to go into different territory than you might have ever gotten to go in other different design projects you take a logo project is going to give you this much flexibility and control over to do crazy stuff. Oh, but I digress. The most important aspect here is to have fun, have fun, do good things, experiment, tried stuff, fail, try again, fail again, try some more. It's of course, also important that you did the prep work in the beginning. Because that prep work is going to just kinda set the foundation for some really interesting stuff later on down the road. If you'd gone through this whole process and you hadn't talked to your print shop, you hadn't figured out what colors we're going to work. You hadn't understood how the paper is going to operate. You didn't know exactly what kind of print process you're gonna do if you didn't figure all of this stuff out in the first place, well then you're, you're, you're setting yourself up for failure. But hey, failures only a failure if you quit, right? We're not quit and we're going to move on to the next thing, not in this class, but on your own. If you do go and make new stuff, I hope you shared with me. I hope you tag me on Instagram or on Twitter or wherever it is that you decide to share that work. Go ahead and tag me because I'd love to see what you're doing and if you ever have any thoughts or questions about it, well then, hey, there's a comment section down below. You can go down there. And it would be remiss if I didn't share that, if you ever considered making your own font out of your own handwriting, I've got a course called fast fonts, and it's actually available here on my profile if you want to check it out, There's probably links below. You have an inkling to check out some of the other stuff that I've done. Make sure you go check out Dave cadre.com. That'll take you to a page with all the links of all the things that have been into specifically My companies for live.com, where I create digital effects for other people to use in things like this. In fact, some of them were included in this poster right here, which you're gonna get your hands on because you weren't here. Nice job is also going to be a link to my YouTube channel, which of course I'm sharing a lot of free stuff there too. So go check that out and make sure you tell me where you came from. Make sure he said, Dave, I took poster maker and now here am over on your YouTube channel. Pat me on the back. I warned you in the beginning, I was gonna be a bit of a cook anyway. Great job. We're getting all the way to the end. I hope you had fun. I hope you enjoyed the process and I hope you go make more posters. In fact, I'm gonna go make another one right now just because I can and I hope you do too. Okay. Remember, be good today, be better tomorrow. Thanks again. See you.