Poster design with AD, introduction

[spawnartisticdirections]

Hello,

 

Just bought Affinity Designer, after the trial software made it quite accessible to finish a friend's gig poster on time. I haven't done much design work in a fair while, and educating myself on the needs of printed materials took longer than I'm thrilled to admit. The software helped me greatly with its accessible layout, and it didn't require much relearning from when I did these things years ago.

 

I started by cleaning up a photo I took with Aperture, a software I find to be overlooked. From there, a challenge was the size and resolution of the photo. The photo was taken in a hurry on a fly-by visit from the musician, on the 16:9 setting and didn't leave ample crop room to set to A3. He really liked the photo though. From here the challenge was duplicating part of the image - for width, composition/ layout, and to make it all available at 300dpi. Importing tiles of backdrop taken from the original photo, and carefully placing and graduating transparency on them was an effective way to not make the join particularly visible.

 

Laying out the text was easier, and finding the specific fonts online was no problem, but to make it most effective the smallcaps function helped me out. It made the compound word that was one band's name more distinct from those with spaces in. And it made the font appropriated from the record sleeve much easier to read quickly.

 

For these layout aspects being easy to find and execute, and the result being one we were all pleased with, I was very happy to get the software for future use. 

 

Good to meet you all,

 

Christie.

 

P.S. Sometimes this file uploads really red, so if it does that, you can see it on my tumblr here: http://spawnartisticdirections.tumblr.com/post/147280447006/

[MattP]

Hey, very nicely done! Looks great - I'm going to see if I can find him on iTunes and have a listen! :)

[spawnartisticdirections]

Thank you, that's really sweet. I think this will be his first work on iTunes, but in the meantime his Youtube is here.

 

The cool thing is, I'm now working on the product design for the EP being launched. I shall probably approach it in much the same way as the poster and it will be good further practice before I go more abstract in my own work. I'll share that here when it's done, though it should be a simple affair. On a design note, it was nice to receive well organised copy for it the same day :) In my experience that's hard to come by.