Postcards and Posters

Postcard (The box in the middle isn't supposed to be there.There's supposed to be a line dividing the two sections. Unfortunately it decided not to show up.)

Poster

While making the poster and postcard, I used three programs: Adobe InDesign, Adobe Photoshop, and Adobe Illustrator. This assignment was an essential exercise in design communication because it made me use and experiment with different programs and incorporates them onto one platform. Using these three programs was essential to these projects because things such as postcards, posters, and many more, aren’t designed using only one program. There are specific programs for different things, such as Photoshop for image editing, InDesign for publication and layout, and Illustrator for creating things such as shapes, backgrounds, designs, and more. Using all three allowed me to be creative with what I was making, and all together make a well-designed product.

The use of colors was a very important decision to make. On my poster, which focused on bullying, was more serious than the postcard that was about me. The colors should reflect the topic of your design. So, I used black and white for the bullying poster, and used red sparsely as emphasis. Two contrasting colors, to represent the seriousness of the topic, with red, that makes anything POP, which could be dangerous if it isn’t used properly. I never would have put a color such as yellow on a poster that was trying to make a sad, depressing statement, because yellow doesn’t come off as a serious color. BUT, where in my postcard that’s about me, I did use yellow! The calmer dark blue and pale yellow looked very elegant together, and with the white text, everything looked crisp. That’s what you want when choosing colors, don’t just choose ‘em because you like ‘em, but choose colors that blend nicely together that won’t exhaust your eyes (no neons!) and doesn’t clash making your work look tacky.

For the postcard I used a font called “Dazzling Divas” and “A little sunshine” that I downloaded for free from dafont.com. “Dazzling Divas” was what I used for my name (header) to give it more of a fancy, hand signature look. The rest of the text (subhead and paragraph text), I used “A little sunshine” to give, again, a handwritten look that was more easily legible than the header font. I figured that it should reflect the way I write because the postcard is about me.

For the poster, I used “Baby Blocks” and a more serious, “Century Gothic” font. Of course, the baby blocks were cutesy but what they spelled out was impactful so it counter acted the cutesy feel the blocks would’ve given off. Century Gothic is naturally a little wide and a little bold so this serif font gave a serious, straightforward feel to the text (as it should!)

Using design hierarchy was a little tricky when you have so much information to present, yet want to give a clean, organized look. With the poster, I tried balancing the top and the bottom, as well as the left and the right sides of the paper, so the poster wouldn’t look heavy on one side. Allowing a fair amount of white space and organization of information and images are key. So having one photo to the left of the page, and another set to the right, balanced it out. Same with the text at the top and bottom of the page. Things that wouldn’t follow the design hierarchy would be clustered information, more than 2 fonts, an overwhelming amount of images or graphics, and poor layout of information (such as making your paragraph font size larger than then header) and such.
I did the same with the postcard, allowing text to sit on both the left and right side of the page to create balance and placing images and graphics on each side of the postcard with a middle header and design (the line that’s vertical in the middle).

Overall, I enjoyed making these two projects because I got to work with the programs more. I used InDesign as my main program where I laid out the text and images from the other programs. I used Photoshop to silhouette, re-size, and recolor the images. Illustrator was used to make borders (such as the one on the postcard), lines (the line in the middle of the postcard), and shapes (such as the banner around my name on the postcard).

I am satisfied with the results of my postcard and poster, but of course there’s always room for improvements. Practice makes perfect, so working with these programs more will do nothing but teach me new skills and provide me with more design opportunities in the future.