Visual Design Principles
Here are a few ideas to keep in mind as you design a poster using the five ISUComm visual communication principles:
Pattern
In Photoshop you can drag guidelines from the ruler onto your poster. Use these to define basic text and image spaces for proportional relationships. Decide whether your dominant shapes will be rectilinear or curvilinear.
Figure-Ground
One of the clearest indicators of naive visual design is the absence of depth or dimension. Consider overlapping objects, adding drop shadows, or varying the transparency of objects as simple ways to create the illusion of three dimensions.
Direction
Consider a strong diagonal for directional interest. The custom shape tool in Photoshop is amazingly versatile. Use the “free transform” under the Edit Menu to skew and distort shapes as well as to scale them into large, abstract elements; then add effects like drop shadows and reduced opacity to create distinct areas in your design. Colorful, abstract images can be treated the same way; for this purpose ignore the image’s subject matter and think instead of shape and color.
Chunking
Solid color geometric shapes as well as custom shapes can be useful backgrounds for chunking major content areas visually. Severely cropped images can be excellent space dividers. Large letters, numbers, and punctuation varied in color and size can be used to visually mark areas, too. Likewise, pale images (2-5% opacity) can serve as chunking backgrounds.
Color
Don’t feel that you have to figure out color schemes yourself. Find a photo or image that has a pleasing and appropriate color combination and paste/import it into Photoshop. Then use the eye dropper to sample colors from the image. Three colors (plus neutrals like white, black, grey, and tans) are all you need for an effective poster or web page design. In general pale backgrounds are the most versatile. Dark ones are dramatic but present more problems in readability and eye strain. Foreground and background colors must have considerable contrast to work effectively.
Photoshop Basics
In our workshop today, you’ll get a chance to start designing a poster for a course you’ll be teaching next year, perhaps making it double as a web page design as well. Here are the basic areas we’ll cover:
File Setup
For our poster, we’ll use a 4:3 aspect ratio (same as a typical computer or TV screen). By using a 10 x 7.5 inch image, it will work as a small poster to fit on standard 8.5 x 11 paper or, when printed at 400%, it can be sent over the network as a smaller file and printed as a large-format poster. To prepare for print, we’ll use CMYK (RGB for the web) and a higher resolution (300 vs. 72 for the web). As a rule, always set the background to transparent; you can create your own background color as a separate layer in the document, where color can easily be changed. Note in the setup dialog box that the file should be around 25 megabytes.
Toolbox
For our poster exercise, you’ll just need to use these tools (see red stars in Toolbox Overview): the Marquee tool for selecting areas and cropping, the Move tool for selecting/moving objects, the type tool for creating text, the shape tools for creating background shapes, tabs, bullets, etc., and the eye dropper for selecting colors.
Layers Palette
While Photoshop is loaded with palettes, the workhorse is the layers palette. Here each object (text, image, special effect, background) goes into its own layer, stacked on top of each other like transparencies. You can turn layers on and off, switch their order, change their transparency, duplicate them, and group them. It is the most powerful design element in Photoshop. It will allow you to create a poster and a web page out of the same elements just by turning layers on and off selectively.
Images
Pasted images go directly into their own layers (which you should then name). Placed (imported) images get individual layers as well with the file name automatically serving as the layer name. Placed images first appear with a huge X indicating that you are in “free transform” mode. Here you can resize, position, rotate, and otherwise manipulate the shape of the image before “placing” it in your poster. Hit the return key to accept these changes or the escape key to cancel them. Use the command-T (control-T in Windows) to reenter free transform mode.
Text
With the text tool, either click on your poster to start typing a single line or draw a box to start typing a multiline text block. Special effects like drop shadows and bevels work on text as well as images (resist going overboard here). These effects can be named as styles and applied to new objects just by dragging the style icon on top of an object. Each text block will be named for the text within it.
submitted by Don Payne