Self Publishing - The poster - with Nick Deakin

Today's process and production workshop was about type. The tables were covered in paper with alphabets on in normal and caps and in three different fonts. Everyone was given a fortune cookie because we were to cut out the words and make a poster spelling out the message in the fortune cookie! Mine said 'Hear with your ears but listen with your heart'. I chose a sans serif font because it was my favorite and began cutting out the letters. I decided to not cut out the word 'but' because it would save time. Once cutting them out I had to position them on the page and try make it look cool. I tried many different variations before settling on this because I liked it the most and then glued them down. I cut out 'hear' and 'listen' in caps because they were the most interesting words in the phrase and also spread them along one line. Then 'ears' and 'heart' is on its own line to emphasize them, left aligned and slightly wonky to inject some fun into the design. Everyone's poster got put on the wall to showcase everyone's work. It was nice to see all the different cookie quotes and layouts. 

The second part of the workshop was to do some group work. My table got into a group of five and we were given three song lyric verses to pick from and then make a hug poster using the all the words. We picked number two which said:

'Home is where I want to be

Pick me up and turn me round

I feel numb - born with a weak heart

I guess I must be having fun

The less we say about it the better

Make it up as we go along 

Feet on the ground

Head in the sky'

At first we thought of putting the words inside a cloud drawn on paper which related to head in the sky. However once we all began cutting the sans serif font but soon realized it would not all fit so we put the words on in lines on the paper portrait. Similar to what I did, we cut certain words out in caps, the rest not, to add emphasis. We then arranged the words in a way we all agreed on and glued them!

Nick looked and said it would be cool to add a little something extra. We were worried it looked like it could have been typed and all wanted to edit the words in some way to make it more interesting. We decided to add a 'drop shadow' to the bold letters. We did this by cutting out with scalpels where a 3D part or shadow would be. I liked this result because when put on different backgrounds, the colour showed through. We put it in front of some yellow balloons that were in the studio, and the yellow shined through and looked really nice.

Overall I am happy with our final poster. However, this process and production session was not my favorite. I found the cutting of the letters boring and tedious and was not a big fan of my final poster, perhaps because the quote was so long and the layout felt restricted. The group project was okay but it still was not my favorite. I think I prefer this kind of type to be made digitally.