• Poster Mood Board

  • While this is not a software assignment, your file needs to be built properly in order to go to production. Then there's the creative process, too.

Creative Process

Once you’ve chosen your type family, you should explore its glyph complement, its repertoire. You can see this in the Glyphs panel in Illustrator. You can even filter through glyphs by category. [support link] Hopefully there’ll be some beauties in there you can highlight on your poster.

Mood Board Approval

Create a single-page PDF mood board. If we were cooking, this would be all the ingredients laid out on the counter. From them, we could see what the dish will be. It should include:

  • colour swatches
  • type specimens
  • a small sample of the type treatment

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Thumbnails

Start with the traditional thumbnails. Since this is such a large poster, it’s tough to make a small thumbnail represent the full-sized artwork. I suggest making your thumbnails a quarter of a letter sheet instead.

Produce lots. Show me. Rinse and repeat.

High(er)-Fidelity Rendering

Once you’ve refined your concepts, you can create a higher fidelity version of your poster. This can be on a full letter or tabloid sized sheet. Remember to use the proportions of the final poster. It measures 12” x 18”. That’s a 2:3 ratio, so you can make your high-fi rendering 6” by 9” on a letter sheet or 8” by 12” on a tabloid sheet.

This is what you’ll base your final poster on. Once you have this done, the creative process is pretty much complete. On to building the final file for production!

Type Size

Be sure to print a section of your poster at 100%. Check the size of the smallest text to ensure it’s large enough to read from 2 metres away.

Work in Progress

As you work on your poster, you can submit your work in progress (WIP) here for feedback. I usually provide it within 24 hours. Please make sure you that you have notifications turned on for BrightSpace so you know when I’ve posted.

Submit on brightspace