Inside Look: Poster Design Thought Process

There's one thing I really enjoy doing, almost as much as photography, and that is tackle a problem and solve it visually... in other words, graphic design.

I'm fortunate to have a steady stream of design jobs on top of my photography to keep me busy. One of the more common things I do month-in-month-out is design posters for events around the city. Most frequently these posters are for my own LiveMusicTO events, but I also get called upon from random clubs and concert venues around the GTA to create engaging visuals that will advertise their event and attract customers.

Step One in the process (pictured above) is always to get in the right mood. Today's design project was for a club in Oshawa, ON and so I started playing electronic dance music to get myself in the right frame of mind for the job.

Below are the design instructions that were sent to me over text messaging.

Now begins the fun part. My wheels start to turn and brainstorm about the words "white out".

Couple obvious things come to mind: The fluid eraser used to make corrections and blizzard conditions in snowy weather. My favorite of the two thoughts was the fluid eraser - what does a fluid eraser do? Well, you spread it over top of words. This lead me to think of how I could reveal, rather than erase, the words on the poster using a brush-like tool in Photoshop. In keeping with the snow/precipitation theme I thought I'd incorporate soft blue hues.

I'm feeling happy at this point with these out-of-the-box ideas. However, as I started to build the rest of the page I began to realise that perhaps this is a little too "indie" for a general dance party event. A little too Nuite Blanche if you will and not enough Party.

Below you can see the gradual evolution of the ideas into the final product. You'll notice I eventually gave up the brush-like effect for something more legible and basic; although I enjoy the simplicity of the first couple designs more, they weren't suitable for this east-of-the-city demographic. I also started toying with the idea of mountains and snow more heavily, to emphasize the winter theme (time of year) as well as adhere to the client's initial request.