Assignment 9: Museum Posters: Colour visuals and finished poster

In the end I decided not to use collage for the colour visuals because I thought there would be lots of resizing and moving things around, drawing in colour sources from the football brands etc, and that would involve a lot of preparation online and printing, whereas I could move things much more easily in Photoshop.

I began by looking at the adult poster and going to Google images to find the stripes on the shirts of both teams so I could either use those stripes directly or match colours for them. If I decided to use similar colourways across all three posters I would be basing them on the team colours as that was the only poster in which the precise colours would be so important. I cropped these stripes from the photos of the shirts.

I placed these onto a 8x12 inch background and moved them around in conjunction with the gallery photo.

The result was not what I’d hoped for. The background diagonal stripes totally overwhelmed the gallery photo and trying to match the angle of the photo to the angle of the stripes put the photo at a slant which compromised the viewing of it.

I tried altering the angle of the image to make it more understandable. Now I had 2 diagonal angles. It was way too busy and visually confusing.

I tried making the image horizontal. Then I tried reducing the opacity of the background stripes. Then I decided that the stripes had to go.

I reduced to one stripe of each colour, with reduced opacity. It looked like a flag, an irrelevant visual feature.

I went back to the stripes, made them vertical and the image horizontal, and added indications of the areas for text and logo. Still the stripes were dominant. I had to take a different approach.

I decided to try working with blocks of colour, in a similar way that I did with the lightbulb exercise. 

This seemed to have more potential, but the area of blue didn’t match well with the Sheffield Wednesday memorabilia. I changed the colour balance to a better match.

Then I added areas for text and logo.

I was happier with this composition so I left it there and went on to work on the teenage poster.

I used the colour block from the United strip, with its slightly altered colour balance, as a background. As previously, I used a 8x12 inch background. I placed the elements as I had in my chosen thumbnail, again using shapes in the cream colour from the adult poster. I was happy with this composition. I’d used the original photo I chose for the thumbnails, rather than the one I printed for the trial backgrounds, and I preferred it. The colours and simplicity seemed to work so I left it at that.

I moved on to work on the poster for children.

It was tricky to get the images placed within the vertical space as they were not all the same size/dimensions, but I finally managed it. I began with the lime green background from the thumbnails, but found it overwhelming. Nevertheless I continued with it to try some variations of text placement. 

This appeared to be a possibility in the thumbnails but in digital it was like the diagonal image in the first adult poster design with the steeply diagonal image. It was at too much of an angle as it needed to accommodate the length of the phrase ‘treasure hunt’. 

This composition was better, but I was starting to worry about the green and red combination as it would look for colour blind children. Also, the lime green was disrupting the visual hierarchy by being more vibrant than the images and text.

I tried the reddish background block from the other posters as a background. While it’s still bright enough to be attractive to people, especially children, I was still concerned about the red/green combination. I thought it could work if I used colour blocks behind the green text, such as the cream colour from the other posters, but I thought using silver would be worth trying, whilst preserving the limited colour palette.

I felt that this would work, once the force of actual text rather than thin lines emphasised the silver grey.

I wanted to try one more thing. I thought that yellowing and desaturating the green background could solve the colourblind issue and keep the brightness of the poster, whilst not overwhelming the foreground elements. 

This view shows the colour visuals as a group. Whilst there are differences there does seem to be some visual integrity between them. Coming back later, however, I decided that I preferred the reddish background, which would give more of a corporate feel too.

Having completed colour visuals for the three posters, my next task was to work one of them up to a finished design. Somewhat to my surprise, I enjoyed working on the football theme most, so I decided to make the adult poster into a finished design.

I needed to incorporate the Sheffield Museums logo, or a mock-up logo for the project. I decided to try first with the actual logo. I photographed the logo from the blue leaflet, but it was very small and became very poor reproduction when I cropped it out. 

I wasn’t sure that I’d be able to use it but decided to try. I used the ‘lighten’ blend mode and made the logo small, and this produced a good enough result on screen  I would need to print at full size to check that the logo is of sufficient quality.

Again I had placed the image at too steep an angle. I moved it. 

I saved that and began a new image. I created a long, thin strip of the cream colour as background, and added the text. I hadn’t considered this before, but as I was typing the text I wondered how it would look if I switched the colours around so that there would be red on blue and blue on red. (This is probably some football team-related heresy!) I chose arial as my font, because my observation of posters showed me that a commonplace font had the dual advantage of not detracting from the image and keeping things clear and simple. 

I added this to the poster in another layer. I was pleased to see that the two words fitted exactly into the two halves of the background. I would have liked to make the logo the same cream colour but I thought another edit would definitely push the logo image beyond the realms of printability. 

While I was pleased with the composition, I felt that the design needed improvement. The background seemed, not dominant exactly, but perhaps having equal shares with the image, whereas it needed to play a supporting role. I addressed this by reducing the opacity of the background layers.

I tried an opacity of 85% but that seemed too faded. It had lost some impact.

I tried it at 92% but that seemed too vibrant. In the end I settled for 90% opacity and I altered the colour balance of the blue half to make it rest at a midpoint between the colour of the brochure and the stripes on the Henderson’s Relish label. This is the finished poster.

This has been an interesting way of working from initial ideas to finished piece. The most important thing I learned is that, while the thumbnail sketches are great for trying out composition, and the speed of drawing allows for the motivation and timescale to try many ideas, the colour visuals make an important next step. Roughed out colourways in coloured pencil didn’t give a clear enough idea of the impact, or lack thereof, in digital. For example, the gentle light green in the children’s  poster thumbnail didn’t correspond to the intensity of the block of colour on screen, and the same was true of the shirt stripes on the early drafts of the adult poster. Creating colour visuals was a bit more time consuming, but still fairly swift in Photoshop, and it was a good way of moving ideas forward and being able to put variations side by side and make reflective choices between them. Before making colour visuals I thought they would be a lot of work and be like making several finished versions, but that was not the case. I found that I could make alterations and screenshots quite quickly and then compare the screenshots. It also made a big difference to follow my tutor’s request for me to show more of the variations I tried. Screenshotting them meant that I could have the variations all together on the screen and choose what worked best, rather than trying to remember earlier versions. It was a useful stage in the design process and I think it made for a better outcome with the finished poster.