APP Home (AOI): Developing the Illustration into a Poster

Even though the competition asks for just the illustration I have decided to take it that step further and incorporate it into a poster design, much like the ones that will were shown around London. I looked at past designs done for the same competition (as this is their third year doing it) as well as a few more, and all of these are shown on my Pinterest board ‘posters’: http://www.pinterest.com/lizjowen/posters/ 

Sketches 

With these ideas in mind I jotted down some notes on what I wanted to include in the poster and roughly sketched out some initial ideas. I found myself to be quite limited because of the nature of my illustration: the border and dimensions of my poster made it difficult to work with. It would work fine if it was printed at a standard poster size but I stuck with A3 in order to be able to present it in my portfolio.

Working on InDesign

After laying out all of my ideas on the page I decided to carry them across to InDesign, creating an A3 sized file and then placing my illustration onto it. I had a bit of play with layout, as I just wanted to see what the illustration would actually look like with each idea. 

I then focused on the idea of having an opaque box like one of the inspirational designs, and started to write in the type. I used one of the posters as reference.

I used this reference to see what kind of typeface they’ve used, and it seems like they’ve only used one throughout the poster. It’s a sans serif, and because it lacks any ‘emotion’ I tried out Gill Sans and a couple of other typefaces. The one that looks the most accurate was Gill Sans, as my research into their typeface was fruitless. 

I wasn’t keen on the idea of having a slightly opaque box covering some of the details so I worked on another idea, which was to fit the type into Sherlock’s silhouette. 

I created a box on the side of my illustration to help me out when it came to laying out all of the type so that it flowed consistently. I then dragged it back into the illustration when I was satisfied.

However I realised that in order for all of the text to be presented nicely, the pt size was extremely small which might even look tiny when printed out. I had to think of another way, so I went back to the idea of having the box along the bottom. At this point I also looked at Serco’s and AOI’s logo (as well as the Mayor of London) and brought them all to be edited in Photoshop before placing them onto the poster.

I wasn’t too keen on this layout so I went back to filling in the text in Sherlock’s silhouette. I used the writing that I had done in the box layout and brought it across so that I wasn’t making the pt size really small. 

When I zoomed out I realised that the colours of the illustration were very, very dull compared to what they should be like. I therefore carried out an experiment: I created a new document, created two pages with the illustrations and text, then went to see what would happen when I placed the logo onto it and voila, that was my problem.

The only alternative was the export the file as a JPEG and then I added the logos on in Photoshop. 

I then came up with these two designs. 

Conclusion:

Looking at both of these side-by-side I've decided to go with the top design, although adjustments will need to be made to the layout of the type as it looks slightly 'squashed' at the moment. I should probably change the arrangement of the words as well to match the posters I referenced from.

Unfortunately I didn't take screenshots of the adjustments made to the typography and layout as they were done on a computer at university. When I do find them I shall create a new post of my development.