In design we learnt about the rule of thirds a design method I used. It is really the way in which we read that makes this important, as we read from left to right if you keep the main things on the left the poster will be more attractive. Proximity is another rule that I learned in class which I really had to take into account in several stages of my creation process in which I need to move text and still keep it aligned. As I just mentioned Alignment was also a rule in which I tried greatly to not break. I did my best to keep everything in one stream of reading. By that I mean that I wanted nothing to fight for attention, I wanted the person seeing the poster to see the text or image first recognize the image or text and read it then continue on to the next interesting thing. So alignment and proximity had a large role to play there. So when I was designing my format, I took into account the rule that I decided to follow without any exceptions, Keep It Simple Stupid. None of my posters are too busy or are complex. That is why I think that they work well because they are all neat, and clean. I find with all my favourite wallpapers and posters that the simple ones tend to be my favourites. That is what really drove my ideas and where my inspiration dawned from. Because I’ve got and seen many posters where there is too much text and to many images or things in the image that mess it all up. So over complexity is certainly not something that I had any problems with. However deciding on precise format was, because I originally drew all my posters by hand; and when in the creation process saw them as singular posters and ignored the others, focusing purely on my drawings. So when it was brought to my attention that my posters needed tweaking (and in one case entire rethinking however I kept the theme) I had to really make my format more precise. That is when I decided on the image left corner, text in the centre and logo in the bottom right corner format. Which I personally think looks very good.
When it came to creating the poster there were some difficulties that arose. There were many difficulties that came with Photoshop a program that before had little experience with. Some issues came with the computer I was using at school, as it had difficulties with not freezing. Others came from my lack of Photoshop knowledge, such as using different brush tools as well as manipulating certain filters and other tools. I spent allot of time using the paint brush. The biggest use of it was the Thinkers poster. In the original photograph Manson is sitting in a red couch that stretched for most the screen and it made the poster to busy, something I did not want to do. So blacked it out using the brush tool, sounds easy however; due to the strength of the red and brown colours I could not leave a single red pixel. So I had to zoom in and going over the entire thing with my brush as small as possible, trying not to mess up Manson’s body. This is similar to what I did on the balanced however that was water marked and I had to get rid of that which required me to again zoom in and make my brush have a one pixel width. The poster with the most sophisticated work put into it would be the risk takers poster. It has 3D text as well as neat outlines of the risk takers layer in this red to black gradient. I got the 3D text by first of all stylizing the layer, giving it a shaded side. Then I duplicated the layer zoomed in to be really close, and moved the layer slightly to the right and I repeated this roughly three or four times. I then merged all the layers down, till there was one left. On this final layer of the RISK TAKER text I kept the shading to give it more depth. However before I did this I had previously made a layer of text which was red. I attempted to give it more depth by putting a gradient in it from red to black. This I did not like. However when I deleted it for whatever reason left a mark the outline of the letters which I did not notice until I began moving the text. I actually like it I think it looks really cool. For me the focus was really the Image. Everything else such text and colour fell into place based on the image. Best example of this would be the Thinkers Poster it went well with black, and the texts were all put in place around the image. Even the white in the IB logo had to change to black.
For our first term in technology, we looked at design. We saw many good posters as well as bad ones. We learnt the rules of design and began dissecting posters, learning why some worked and some did not. We looked into the rule of thirds and touched upon alignment. We discovered all the key elements of good design. Then we had to put them into use, to display what we had learned. We had to design three posters as well as a poster format. This proved to have many difficulties, but in the end I am happy with my final products. They are simple, clean and look nice and the text is well suited for my format. Since the project was to take the IB learner profile attributes posters and make them into our own. The second poster I made was the RISK TAKERS poster. It is made from mistakes. When I originally wrote the text it was nice red, so I decided to change it using the gradient to make it look cooler. This failed so I decided to change it to a metallic 3D shaped text, based on the transformers text. Things did not go to plan, however the text did become 3D. As for the image in the bottom left , it is meant to be similar to the image of the monk who set himself on fire in protest of the Vietnam war, however I do not know what the story behind it is exactly though. Like every poster of mine the IB logo is located in bottom right corner. I really like this poster because the text grabs you’re attention and make your eye follow the path of importance, from text, to image to logo. Then again continuing my format with the thinkers’ poster following the format of image in the bottom left hand side and text in the top, and IB logo in the bottom right hand side, and again the text grabs you’re attention and you follow it down toward Marilyn Manson. You may notice that Manson is closer to artistically than he is rationally this was not a mistake, because obviously he is more an artistic thinker than a rational thinker. This is based on one of the elements of design we looked at proximity.
