I was recently given the chance to design an event flyer for
@Wired, an upcoming multimedia poetry event in Houston. Here I'll be walking you through the (abridged) process of taking the poster from initial brief to final graphic.
As always, we start with the sketches. Here I was trying to find a single way of encapsulating the various ideas and themes of the event.
RadamesO gave me an event description to work from as I brewed the initial batch of ideas. The key words I focused on were
wired, social media, poetry, music, and
technology.
As you can see, a problem with several of the posters is that they were too heavy on the
music side of the theme. Cool though they may have been, they were the wrong look for the event.
Eventually it was agreed that the Twitter-inspired layout from the second set of thumbnails was where it was at. It kept with the "social media" and "technology" themes and left plenty of room for each performer to put in info about their particular performance.
Once the basic design was decided upon, it was up to me to start assembling the poster. A few screencaps of Twitter and an afternoon in Photoshop later, the first draft was completed!
Once the skeleton was assembled, I started adding in the text. (And learning a lot about Photoshop's text-formatting options!)
Finally, there were some tweaks to be made. (Read: There were 10 rounds of back-and-forth edits to the wording and the images.) But, it was all worth it when the final product emerged.
So there you have it. An awesome poster for a sure-to-be awesome event. For more info check out the
@Wiredpoetry on Twitter and on
Facebook (and see more of my graphics in action!)
(Many thanks to
RadamesO,
ThePoetMendez,
ByronJonesPoet and
BrigitteZ for the great experience!)
Labels: art, commission, design, photoshop, wip, wired
