Graphic Poster and Design
After two semesters of working at the Media lab and witnessing its first year of establishment, I have dealt with some of the same, easy-­‐to-­‐fix questions concerning the lab. So to help users be more comfortable in the new space, I want to design posters for the Media Lab, guiding and helping users with using the scanners. Getting started Before doing anything on Photoshop, Illustrator, or Indesign, gather any illustrations, color scheme, and textual information you want to include in the poster. These are the elements most important for communicating its intended purpose. Design sketches. Creating Outlines For Fonts On Illustrator This step is important for understanding vector graphics. You will work with multiple functions with just the Pen Tool. For instance, you will be working with fills and strokes, swatches and color libraries, and drawing and editing paths.  Understanding and creating paths and anchor points A path is nothing more than a line you see between two points. All artwork outside of the illustrations in Illustrator is made up of paths. Anchor points are the joints that connect the paths. The reason why we want to create paths and outlines for our words is that we want to be able to add colors to them.  Create Outlines of the Words  Now there are paths for the words so that you can fill them with color Coloring Images  Select Live Paint tool  Use the paint bucket tool to color in the now vectored image When you have created all of the text images and colored them accordingly to your liking, you will have something like this:  Incorporate any of your illustrations onto the design by placing files from your computer  This is why before you start your project, you should work on creating a sketch and illustrations that will be in your graphic poster. You can readily place your images onto you design.  Creating illustrations using line segments  Use line segment tool for crop illustration Use the stroke color picker to edit the line’s color  Change the stroke size of the line if preferred located at the top right under the tool bar  Viola! Here is the finished product! Further Information Tutorial on how to use the pen tool on Adobe Illustrator CS6 http://www.lynda.com/Illustrator-­‐tutorials/Converting-­‐corners-­‐
curves/122469/138821-­‐4.html Tutorial on how to utilize the functions of text wrapping, text rotating, and placing text in Adobe Indesign CS6 http://www.lynda.com/articles/indesign-­‐secrets-­‐how-­‐to-­‐place-­‐and-­‐link-­‐
text-­‐without-­‐its-­‐formatting Produced by: Whitney Chen ULN Internship Program PCL Media Lab Spring, 2015