Category: Dev Log

To go with my posters and digital advertising I decided that merchandise was an interesting next step for my arts festival, merchandise is always a good way to promote an event and allows people to indirectly spread the word about an event. I decided that a good step for what merchandise to make for the festival was tote bags. As my target audience is young people I know that a lot of the current y2k/ indie fashion trends encompass totes as the bag of choice.

I searched on freepik for a free use tote bag mock up to use to showcase my designs. Once I had this I started to edit the file and place my graphics onto it. I wanted to create the designs directly onto the bags instead of working in another file first as I felt it helped me to really visualise the space better and allow for the design to develop organically to fit the space. I made two variations of this bag, a blue version and an orange version, keeping a similar layout for both. I took the text directly from 2 of my posters to tie it into the advertising designs strongly. I initially was only going to design the front of the bags but created a fun flower pattern for the back side which I really love the mismatched vintage feel of.

After I made tote bags I decided that stickers would be another thing that would fit well with the branding and promotion for the festival itself. I decided that the designs would be reminiscent of the icons for the social media accounts. I wanted to do this so there would be a link to the physical merchandising and the digital branding. I created some square designs to start using my font and some of my graphics following the colour scheme and then went to find a mock up file for stickers. I found this also on freepik for free use to showcase the designs properly and show how stickers would look for the brand. I think that these could be a fun edition as either freebies for consumers to promote the event or sold at the festival as paid merchandise. I think they are a really good thing to have for advertising and promotion as stickers fit well with my y2k/vintage target audience and a lot of my design scheme is based on sticker graphics, stickers can be put on anything so are a great way to receive free promotion and press for an event with minimal to no effort on the organisers part except creating the stickers.

---

Mock Up References:

Cosmo Studio, 2022. Round sticker mockup Free Psd. [online] Available at: https://www.freepik.com/free-psd/round-sticker-mockup_12006123.htm#query=rectangle%20sticker&position=0&from_view=keyword [Accessed 15th April 2022].

vectorium, 2022. Tote bag on black mockup Free Psd. [online] Available at: https://www.freepik.com/free-psd/tote-bag-black-mockup_11810572.htm#query=tote%20bag&position=0&from_view=search [Accessed 15th April 2022].

As I had made advertising mockups for my assets on social media, I decided to take my poster designs and add them into a mock up environment to show what these would look like in the real world. I again, as with all my other mock ups, used freepik to find some free use mock up files in styles I wanted. I first found this mock up of a wall with a pasted on poster and thought that this would be a good way to show the physical use of my designs. I added my poster images from my illustrator document into the photoshop file and as I had been working to standard sizing they fit perfectly within the file. I think that these mock ups really show how bright and interesting my designs would look out in the real world. I think that the main title text and the subheading is bold and readable and that the smaller informational text is a good size to get the information across to the viewer effectively. I think they work really well in this type of physical setting and also that posters like this could also be used as merchandise as they are interesting and colourful and make for good decoration.

The second mock up design that I chose to create was one for a poster board. As we have a lot of these around the city of Hull I thought it would be good to see how my design would look in an environment like this as this would most likely be how it would be primarily advertised in person. I found a night time city mockup for the poster board and inserted my images again. I really love how this ended up looking and seeing my designs properly in all the appropriate physical settings really helps to visualise how the outcomes look. I think within my poster designs I was really able to achieve something that relates strongly back to my research and target audience and shows off the styles and collage design elements I wanted to bring together for the advertising for this project.

---

Mock Up References:

Vectorium, 2022. Crumpled poster mockup Free Psd.[online] Available at: https://www.freepik.com/free-psd/crumpled-poster-mockup_11024024.htm#query=poster&position=22&from_view=search [Accessed 21 April 2022]

freepik, 2022, Billboard mockup in city at night Free Psd. [online] Available at: https://www.freepik.com/free-psd/billboard-mockup-city-night_2879640.htm#query=billboard&position=4&from_view=keyword [Accessed 21 April 2022]

I decided that a good next step with my 3 final designs and their social media variants would be to place these in situation to really get the full effect of the digital presence they would have. Before starting this however I decided that I should make some icons use within the Instagram mockups I was creating. I created these in a square size to make them universally useable for anything I may have needed. I created 4 variants for this, two with just the letter I for Indigo on them and 2 others with images similar to those of the posters. I really like all 3 of the icons I created using my colour scheme, font, graphics and photographic assets and I think all of them turned out really well. I do however like the yellow I design and the first one with the rainbow the most as I think both are striking in their own ways and can be used in many ways.

Once I had these images created, I set to editing a screenshot of the Instagram app to resemble an account for the festival. I used photoshop to construct this mock up of an instagram profile for the festival and tried to make it look as realistic as possible. I used the yellow icon for the profile photo and ended up using the other 3 for highlight reels with more information accessible about the festival for the audience. I kept the description simple and added the link as mentioned on my posters so that the profile looked complete, from here I added in my instagram sized design assets and placed them as posts on the feed, I think this looks like a convincing instagram profile and is really able to capture the essence of the festival I was trying to go for in my research.

Below are the post mock ups that I created for the festival, showing off the designs I have made and how they would be used in context of advertising the festival to the intended target audience from my research. I really do think this was an important further step in my design process so I could see how the advertisements and their information come through in a real situation that they would be viewed. I created 6 of these design mock ups to show how each of my designs would look in the context and I think all 3 of my design themes are very effective and the colours are striking and eye catching, matching together into a cohesive advertising brand whilst also staying individual and memorable to themselves. I think the use of an ongoing colour palette used throughout the designs and the consistency of the sticker graphics, it really pulls all the designs together.

---

Image References:

Adesina. D, 2018. Woman in Yellow Coat With Black Crossbody Bag Closing Her Eyes. [online] Available at: https://www.pexels.com/photo/woman-in-yellow-coat-with-black-crossbody-bag-closing-her-eyes-833052/ [Accessed 8 April 2022].

uncoveredlens, 2019. Photo Of Man Bringing Radio. [online] Available at: https://www.pexels.com/photo/photo-of-man-bringing-radio-3620411/ [Accessed 9 April 2022].

For my 3rd and final design for the festival’s promotional materials I first started by choosing my images that I wanted to use and liked the look of. I chose some images with skateboards in to tie them in together. All of the images I chose for each of these designs was carefully selected as I wanted the modern style vibes of each image and the right aesthetic for my overall target audience to appreciate. Once I had my three images chosen, one for the background and two others for the foreground layering elements I set to editing these last 2 images so I could start making my poster design.

To edit the two images I took them both into photoshop and used the selection tool to select the elements of the background that I didn’t want within my design. Removing the backgrounds was an easy process as I used the techniques I had previously used in my other designs. For the image with the Simpsons skateboard, this was quite hard to edit with the background being red and reflecting onto the subject making it difficult to cleanly select the image so I had to make some adjustments with the eraser tool to make sure the image was clean and looked professional. For the other image I decided not to remove the flooring and the steps from the image, only the top portion of the background. I felt this would give a cleaner overall design and allow for more dynamic layering within my design piece.

Now that I had all my images prepared to create the collage I took these into illustrator and started to play around with all the different images together to see how they looked best. I decided on making the image with the people on the steps the foreground images and then the other figure the middle centre of the image to draw the most attention. I then added in the logo on top of the guy layering it in front of him as I really liked how the curve of the G in the logo fits within the image, I chose the blue and an orange for the title as I hadn’t used this combination yet on any of my other poster designs. Once I added the title and the bottom text from the other posters so it would match, I then referred back to my sticker document and chose some smiley faces and hearts to put into the document. I felt this was looking a bit plain at first so pulled the idea of an outline of the figure from my first document and applied it to the main figure in this poster design, I decided to use the green from my colour palette as I didn’t really find another place to fit it and I think it has a fun contrast to the piece whilst matching with all of the blue and yellow tones. I also decided to add in the rainbow sticker decal as well to balance out the poster and fill the empty space, adding to the collage effect.

Once I had this main poster made and all the additional elements in place I was happy with the outcome and proceeded to create the instagram/social media sized digital materials. I created these in a similar way to how I made the ones for design 2. I decided that each one would have one of the foreground images on it so that they could really be the focus individually to show off the design elements. I created these with the same text as the previous designs and added one image onto each ad. I think that these look really effective and interesting and draw the users eye to them in their own ways with the fun bright colours and cool stickers.

After these two social media sized designs were complete I set to making the wider social media story style advertisement. I again used my previous designs as reference and the assets from my existing design 3 pieces. I actually layered these very similarly to my initial poster as I did really enjoy the layout and felt it was the most effective way to display the images and information. Overall I think that I enjoy design 3 the most out of my 3 designs and their assets. I think that this 3rd one really combines the things I like out of the others and is really one of the strongest design sets, making use of my whole colour palette and having the most visually striking images of the 3 posters that I created.

---

Image References:

cottonbbro, 2019. Yellow Black and White Batman Logo [online] Available at: https://www.pexels.com/photo/yellow-black-and-white-batman-logo-4547587/[Accessed 6 April 2022].
Boakye. P, 2018. Men’s Black Leather Jacket. [online] Available at: https://www.pexels.com/photo/men-s-black-leather-jacket-1813947/ [Accessed 6 April 2022].
Miroshnichenko. T, 2020. A Group of People Sitting on Wooden Bleachers Holding Smartphones. [online] Available at: https://www.pexels.com/photo/a-group-of-people-sitting-on-wooden-bleachers-holding-smartphones-5560297/ [Accessed 6 April 2022].

For this second design I had a much better idea of how my designs were going to be formatted from working on design 1. I first began with taking some of my stock images from my collection again and selecting 3 that I wanted to use on this second poster and thought would fit the best together. I chose one image for the background portion of the poster and two for foreground elements to layer with the graphics and text.

I then set to editing these images to remove undesirable elements and tweak colours etc to make them fit better into my overall designs. I first started with the foreground images so that I could work on perfecting them. I began removing the backgrounds on these images using the selection tool and manually selecting the places I wanted to keep, I then reversed this selection and masked the unwanted area so I could tweak it further if needed. I then used the mask in Photoshop to perfect the edges of my selections to make them clean. Once this was done I again, as in the first design, edited the colours a bit to brighten the images to make them clearer overall.

I then set to editing my background image which needed the most work to be closer to what I wanted for my design. I first actually worked on the colours of the image. I wanted to actually reverse them as my chosen foreground images were more warm toned with small hints of blue so I wanted the background to reflect this colour scheme. I used the hue and saturation tools to play with the image till I found a tone that changed the wall colour to a more orangey tone. I then took the image and masked off the door and post from within them and again used the hue settings to apply a blue tone to only these areas to essentially flip the colours of the image around. I think that the image looks a lot better with the colours being flipped over as it looks more warm and natural than the blue walls and it looks more in tune with my other design elements.

As I was editing the image to change the colours within it I didn’t like the actual size of the image and realised I wold probably have to zoom in in quite far to even get it to fill my poster size so I had to edit the image some more to extend it to make it easier to work with. I first extended the Photoshop canvas and then used the patch and clone stamp tools to add more of the wall texture to the space. It is not perfect but as it was to be a background image, some imperfections in the texture or repeating sections would not be noticed. I made the image big enough so that I had a lot of surface area to play with when finally making my designs.

Once the background was done I set to assembling the content together to make my poster design. I first added the background onto the poster size canvas and added in the foreground images. By doing this I could see where I wanted the images to go and where best the edges lined up. I decided that the purple haired girl looked best at the top and the other at the bottom at opposing edges to draw the eye through the design. I then referred to my colour scheme to pick the two colours I wanted to be my accents for the design. I ended up choosing yellow to contrast with the design and dark blue from my palette to match the blue elements present.

I chose to again add flowers to this poster design, but I added two different kinds to add variation to the poster and create a pattern to draw the eye to the poster. I added the sub text from my previous poster to this one, as I wanted all of the variations to have the same text and placed the larger text at the top and the smaller information at the bottom. Behind the top text it felt a little empty so I placed a star graphic there that I hadn’t used before which I think filled this blank wall space well and added to the design a lot layering with the girl at the top.

For the subsequent instagram variants of the poster I chose to make these advertisements using the foreground images individually to really draw attention to them and have 2 variants of these instagram post sized advertisements. I kept all the same graphic elements, text and background but tweaked the placement to fit with each of the foreground images. I really like both of them and think that the similar placement of the flowers in each, with everything else contrasting, gives a memorable look to these designs and ties them together whilst letting the designs be unique.

Finally I created the story advertisement. this one I took inspiration from the poster for and tweaked some of the placements to fit the aspect ratio of a Social Media story. Allowing the story advertisements to look similar to the actual posters helps create a connection with the audience as they will see both in different situations and relate them together.

---

Image References:

Lobanovskaya. A, 2018. Woman Wears Black Leather Zip-up Jacket. [online] Available at: https://www.pexels.com/photo/woman-wears-black-leather-zip-up-jacket-1035685/ [Accessed 25 March 2022].
O’Donnel. E, 2019. Woman Covered In Paint Holding Paint Brush. [online] Available at: https://www.pexels.com/photo/woman-covered-in-paint-holding-paint-brush-3894557/ [Accessed 25 March 2022].
Johnson. S, 2015. Brown Panel Door Near Roll-up Gate. [online] Available at: https://www.pexels.com/photo/brown-panel-door-near-roll-up-gate-845242/ [Accessed 25 March 2022].

To start off the development of this project I first refreshed my understanding of the first part of the project I created, going through all the research and planning that I had undertaken to have the design style I wanted to work for in my mind. Using the fonts that I found, the graphic colour palette I had chosen and the graphic vectors I had been working on to use within any designs I began trying to create my first design. At the beginning of this project I gathered a large amount of free use stock images that I thought were interesting or cool and I used this store of images within my work. I looked through all of the images that I had amassed and saved the ones that I was feeling most drawn to and which I thought would combine well together. Once I had these few images selected I began to start editing them, this process is documented below.

This image is the first one I started to edit and the image I wanted to be the focus of my design so I spent the most time on it. I first took the image into photoshop and cropped out the extra background I did not want to use. Once I had done this I then took the quick selection tool and started to select the parts of the image I wanted, removing and adding to the selection to get a clean selection around the figure in the image. After I had my selection correct, I inverted this selection and made a mask to hide the unwanted background. Once I had done this I played with the brightness and contrast a little to get the image to look more like I wanted. As I was looking at the original image and the one without the background I decided I really liked the use of blue in the background and I wanted to bring this to the figure in the image. Using a mask and a fill layer I used a blue colour and coloured over only the jacket within the image, I then set this layer to Hue and left the opacity on full. This gave the jacket the look of being blue instead of yellow and I liked this a lot better for what I had in mind.

I then proceeded to edit the telephone box image that I also had. I did the same thing with masking the layers and removing the background elements I didn’t want within the image. The final image I chose was a wall of polaroids that I didn’t edit at all as it was going to be the background that all my other images were layered on top of. I really love how all of my image editing turned out and think that my choice to really play with colour on the figure that was to be the lead of the collage helped to really give the design some life and cohesiveness.

Now that all my assets were prepared I started to play with them all and move things around, experimenting with the sticker vector graphics I created and with the font that I had chosen. I kept referring to my colour palette for colours to use on the piece. I chose pink, yellow and the orange tone to be the accent colours of this design for all of the stickers. I chose these as I felt it tied in with the warmness of the background images whilst also contrasting really well with the foreground image of the woman that I had edited. I think the blue in the image really feels like a statement and draws the eye to the design really effectively. Below I was experimenting with the font stroke and how the bottom text could be layered with shapes to provide more visibility. As this was all experimentation it really helped me to see what would work and what wouldn’t for my designs.

Below is some more experimentation based on my first poster attempt above. These are experiments I created for an Instagram post and an Instagram story respectively. I wanted to see how my design choices would scale to different mediums rather than just poster designs to really see how effective the design was and if it would be able to translate through well without compromising information.

Once I had really had the chance to make these first attempts at posters and designs I decided it would be good to go back and rework them and refine the designs with more information and to be more finalised. Below are the reworked designs that I have created. I think these are worthy of being the finals for this first design. I made 2 instagram post advertisements, a story advertisement and then a poster. These all have the full information on them and are correctly formatted to the social media. The instagram post adverts can also be used cross platform as they are scaled properly to fit a standard post on all social media sites. I really love how this design turned out, I think the use of the blue and pink strokes on the text really ties all of the images and stickers together and really makes the design feel whole. I decided that the finalised text and information on the poster would have a dark blue transparent background to them , the colour taken from my colour scheme, so that the white text would stand out starkly against the background and be clear and easy to read.

---

Image References:

Adesina. D, 2018. Woman in Yellow Coat With Black Crossbody Bag Closing Her Eyes. [online] Available at: https://www.pexels.com/photo/woman-in-yellow-coat-with-black-crossbody-bag-closing-her-eyes-833052/ [Accessed 18 March 2022].

Quintero. L, 2019. Black and Gray Telephone Booth. [online] Available at: https://www.pexels.com/photo/black-and-gray-telephone-booth-2111759/ [Accessed 18 March 2022].
Fotios. L, 2020. Collection of old instant photos with trips. [online] Available at: https://www.pexels.com/photo/collection-of-old-instant-photos-with-trips-5653734/ [Accessed 18 March 2022].

Within this post is some assets that I have created using Adobe Illustrator. These assets are small decorative pieces that I can incorporate into my collage designs to add some unique style to them and also add something to link all of the designs together more solidly. Using a set of graphic vectors within each piece allows for a more uniform look between the marketing materials for the festival and allows some consistent colours to be used within the pieces.

To create these assets I first placed my colour palette, I created this whilst deciding on fonts, into an illustrator document so that I had some set colours to work with for my designs. I looked through my research and example collages that I worked on in the last assignment and made a list of the basic graphics that I wanted to create. I started with the easy ones such as the flowers and the smiley faces. I used the pathfinder tools to combine existing shapes to create the floral shapes etc. I used this technique for the cloud and heart as well combining ovals, circles and triangles to get the general shapes. Then I refined the shapes using smooth tools to make sure each graphic was smooth and pixel perfect. The rainbows required semi circle shapes and the pathfinder tool to minus different elements of the shapes and merge them together. I tried different colours from the palette on the graphics that I made as I wanted to see what worked and I think this helped me to solidify my bright colour palette as it adds a fun element to the graphics and I think it will add a lot to the collages that I am going to create. Creating these graphics in advance means that I can use them as part of my style and not have to re create vectors each time as they will be consistent within each piece of media.

Even though I had the fonts for my project chosen, I wanted to try something a bit different just to see where this would take me. I used the font Krona One for this font experiment on my poster and took my initial design and applied this font to it in a different way. All of my previous font choices were very round and soft looking and fit with my theme really well, but I wanted to try this font as it is more square and sharp than my previous choices so very opposite.

I decided that as I was making an experimentation piece for one of my posters I decided to do something really different with the text placement. I took the title of the festival and split it into two lines, calling back to the origin of the festival name being a combination of indie and go, and made the font large and take up a large portion of the design. I chose a stark white colour for all of the text with no stroke or background grounding shapes as I felt the contrast between my rounded soft shapes and the sharp rectangular letters was enough of a contrast to make the text distinct and legible. I used the same font for the sub text on the poster and left the positioning pretty similar to my original designs. I moved some of the image elements around and placed the smiley face stickers behind the letters to add some interest and something different to the design.

After doing this I think I made quite an interesting outcome. I like the boldness of the font and how it looks but I think it doesn’t actually fit very well with my overall themes and the styles I want to include in my posters .The font leaves the image very open and clean looking and quite empty compared to the layered collage style I am going for overall. However I think this was a useful exercise for me to partake in as it allowed me to see a different way my designs could have gone and solidifies my choice for a softer font as I have seen the alternative.

To find fonts that I wanted to use for my project I started by navigating to Google Fonts. I decided that this would be the best place to get high quality free fonts that I could use in a commercial setting. I started by looking through all of the sans serif fonts as I knew I wanted my designs to have clear text that was modern and stood out against the collage background of the content. I found the below 6 fonts that I really liked the look of and set to creating some design sheets to look at my options and how they would work with the text I wanted to incorporate into what I am creating. I took these fonts that I chose and applied the colours from my colour palette onto them to see how they would look within the scheme that I created.

I tried to get a range of fonts to see how different styles would look and play with the boldness and italics of the text. I liked how the Comfortaa font looked as it was very smooth and round and quite modern, whilst also having a sort of vintage feel to it with the round lines of the text and felt this one would be the best for any body text on the designs. I also really liked the Fredoka One font that I found as a title text as it felt really bold and like it would stand out well against any collage backgrounds within my designs. I did like the font Modak a lot for the Indigo title text but I felt it was a bit too complex and would distract from the designs that I was creating too much so I decided that I would go with the Fredoka One font.

For the Indigo font I decided that even though the Fredoka One font was the best I was going to play with the stroke and colour to make it look a bit more interesting within the designs. I did this by layering 2 copies of the text over each other and adding a stroke to both of them. This allowed me to add an almost 3D look to the text and make it look more complex and use more colours on it. I decided that white text would be the best for the project to make it bold and stand out, for the body and the title text, and that the stroke colour of the title was the best way to play with colours and incorporate it into the design and make it feel personal to that specific poster.

Adesina. D, 2018. Woman in Yellow Coat With Black Crossbody Bag Closing Her Eyes. [online] Available at: https://www.pexels.com/photo/woman-in-yellow-coat-with-black-crossbody-bag-closing-her-eyes-833052/ [Accessed 8 April 2022].

Fotios. L, 2020. Collection of old instant photos with trips. [online] Available at: https://www.pexels.com/photo/collection-of-old-instant-photos-with-trips-5653734/ [Accessed 18 March 2022].

Johnson. S, 2015. Brown Panel Door Near Roll-up Gate. [online] Available at: https://www.pexels.com/photo/brown-panel-door-near-roll-up-gate-845242/ [Accessed 25 March 2022].

Lobanovskaya. A, 2018. Woman Wears Black Leather Zip-up Jacket. [online] Available at: https://www.pexels.com/photo/woman-wears-black-leather-zip-up-jacket-1035685/ [Accessed 25 March 2022].

O’Donnel. E, 2019. Woman Covered In Paint Holding Paint Brush. [online] Available at: https://www.pexels.com/photo/woman-covered-in-paint-holding-paint-brush-3894557/ [Accessed 25 March 2022].

Quintero. L, 2019. Black and Gray Telephone Booth. [online] Available at: https://www.pexels.com/photo/black-and-gray-telephone-booth-2111759/ [Accessed 18 March 2022].

uncoveredlens, 2019. Photo Of Man Bringing Radio. [online] Available at: https://www.pexels.com/photo/photo-of-man-bringing-radio-3620411/ [Accessed 9 April 2022].