Friday, February 22, 2008

Process Book

Well, I promised to post a process, so here we go. Today was the 13 hours 01 minute design marathon at SCAD. We were asked to design from scratch a poster for a marathon during 13 hours and 01 minute. As I had imagined, that's an awful lot of time to design one single poster. At least to me. So the marathon started at 9h30 am, and by 2pm I was pretty much done. So the next 8 hours were long as heck, but I spent them tweaking and perfecting little details in the design. Now, without further ado, the process.

1) Research. Since a poster is a very visual and not necessarily conceptual piece, the thing that was going to nail this was the right image. So I started out by going to stock photo sites to look for images. After that, I looked at google for posters designed for other marathons. With th at done, I went to step 2.

2) Sketching. I've gotta admit, I didn't do nearly as many sketches as I should. I did like 5, and I decided to try it out on the computer. But don't do this kids, you want at least 10-15 ideas under your belt before going to the computer.

3)Looking for the elements. I knew I was going to have arrows, and silhouettes, so I went to my huge personal file library, as well as the internet, and searched for that which served me the best. With that done, I started cranking out digital roughs:

1) This one had the idea of the arrows and the runners. The arrows give the idea of direction to the piece, it felt like a good start, but too bare.



2) This is when the piece started to take shape. I got all the right elements in here. I wanted to have a mixture of an urban setting with a little bit of nature, hence, the birds and tree. The larger building is the Bank of America building, which is the most prominent building in the Atlanta skyline.



3) There was very little contrast in the previous version, it almost felt like a computer wallpaper. I increased the size of the elements to create more tension and contrast. The runners became the focal point of the piece and hierarchy was established.



4) Then I played around with the elements a bit just to make sure of what I want is where I want. Tried a few different things, looked at them...




5) And finally, there's the last change that just makes the piece work. The final piece: