Posters

This promotional poster was designed for an organization at a local college here in Oregon. For this event I was given two pictures. One was Ginuwine's "The Bachelor" album cover, and the other was "American Beauty" movie poster. The client wanted a 18x24 poster of ginuwine holding a rose. The problem with photoshoping a rose in Ginuwine's hand is that the perspective are different, not to mention it would look cheeeesssseeeeyyyyyy in the end if you where able to pull it off. In addition when it comes time to print, you will see pixels all over the image causing it to distort.

This is where interpetation comes in to play. A true artist should be able to interpet a client ideas and be creative at the same time. In the past I had trouble focusing on my creative task, and I found myself thinking too much outside the box wasting vaulable design time. Unlike past clients, they was real descriptive on the look they wanted. Which in turn made it easier for me to design because it gave me something to work with. I hate the infamous "Your the artist, come up when something." That means, it's gonna be a waste of time coming up with concepts, designing, and finalizing you work.

I'm becoming long winded, so I'll get back to the project. It's an auction, so no matter how much I think outside the box, there was three remaining facts:

1. They wanted a man holding a rose
2. They wanted the man to be sexy
3. The desired colors were black, red, and grey

I was going for the magazine cover look, so I took pictures of my handsome older brother in various different angles. I reframed from capturing his face because I wanted the audience to have an imagination. By the picture being generic the image becomes something that everyone could relate to.

Now that's understood, I can get into the image itself.
The side profile is so basic it become hard to be creative because your options are limited. I actually struggle with this pose for awhile. And even when I had to red tint, with the text on the right it still looked typical to me. The subject took up the whole left side. I was searching online for inspiration when I came across this magazine cover. The texts was behide the subject and I thought that was a good idea. I ended up pushing the subject down and adding text to cover the subject's head or lack there of. In the end it worked out perfectly. But you be the judge of that.

This is my favorite poster thus far. I learned so much as a designer working on this project that special souts goes out to Nicole Smith for giving the opportunity. It has this soft colorful touch to it that I love. The previous summer before I designed this poster I was expose to the art of saturation, special thanks to my good friend White Rob. This one is for you.

It's one thing to learn something but to apply what you learn is priceless. (I am not trying to make a connection to Master Card, it's just real talk)

Let's break down the work.
First off, there was a lot of text information to incorporate in this project so I was limited in my design approach.
So I researched vintage auction posters (yeah I said RESEARCH for you lames), and was inspired to create a border which frame the information. I then typed in the information and emphasized the main points I wanted to stand out by changing boldness, fonts, etc. After the text was completed, I subsituted the I in auction for an silhouette figure of a female in a flowy dress.

Although the saturated colors, silhouette, scratch out effect, and font played a big part, it was not until I added the 3-d looking arrow pointing down that brung it all together. It subconsciously forces the audience to read the poster from top to bottom. Brilliant

"What would you do?" is an award winning senior film project at the Black Film Festival in '07. My client majored in film so I thought it would be cool idea to advertise the video like a movie poster. The client wanted to spread the message about verbal and phyiscal abuse by creating a video that touched on these topics. So as a designer I did not want to stray away from that.

I choose the color red as the theme color because it represents a tone of anger and violence. Displayed behind and overlapping the female image are facts about abuse, which serves as a more meaningful purpose then just a cool poster. At the bottom of the poster are poses of my big headed girlfriend and myself acting like Ike & Tina Turner. As like credits in movie posers the credits for this project were resevered for those who participated and worked on the production (pre & post production) of this video. My favorite part of this poster are the red strips/borders on each side of the image. I love to frame/contain my work in creative borders. (for the lames who haven't picked up on that yet)

This was a successful project and I'm glad I had the opportunity to work on it.
D-SMITTY WHERE YOU AT?

My Africa, what a challenge. Although at times I felt like this poster was unsuccessful I'm very proud on how it turned out. My clients wanted a tropical poster that represented the different regions of Africa to show cultural diversity. In, addition they wanted people from their specific region to be displayed to target more Africa native students.

The challenges I faced with this project was frustrating. Finding an accurate geographical map of Africa's regions turned out to be unreliable. Most sources was inconsistent. So instead of separating the continent as I originally plan, I choose to represented each region by displaying colorful images of the natives to show cultural diversity. The warm colors accompanied by the gradient silhouette of Africa brought this poster to life. Features like the hand imprints personalize the poster and gives the audience a sense of possession. My Africa. Lastly I added my personal touch, yellow and orange borders to contain my work.

This is another poster like "MY AFRICA" where I blended together elements that worked for me in the previous concepts. After doing a couple of concepts and a little more research on the black panthers movement I thought it would be compelling to re-create a Black Panther Magazine cover. After I had the concept I began plugging in elements to personalize poster. My clients wanted black panthers as their theme, with red, black, and green as the colors. In addition they wanted people that represented the movement at that time. In the end I think this poster turned out well, and I am proud I had an opportunity to express my creative