Digital Graphics for Print | Production Log [Update 6]

Overall I am very happy with how this unit went. I had to make several different creative decisions with my advertisements and needed to change several things throughout the process, but in the end the graphics looked of very good quality.

I was already very fluent in Photoshop, so I didn't have to learn it afresh for this unit. This made creating the graphics fairly easy for me, and I didn't encounter many problems.

Digital Graphics for Print | Production Log [Update 5]

For the magazine advertisement I took a different creative approach. I decided I would keep the video game aspect, so both of my adverts followed the same style, however instead of creating the original images in Photoshop, I would take pictures of actual people.

I dressed my friends Lucy and Corey up as Mario and Luigi respectively, and took them out to a field. I got them to do various poses to show the Mario brothers as 'brothers' and to show the connectivity that BBC Cult will offer.

Here are some of the photos I took:

I ended up deciding on the second one. This is because Lucy and Corey are interacting, which symbolises the slogan I was planning on using for BBC Cult "Bringing People Together".

Originally I had planned to just use the image on the field as my advertisement with the logo and slogan across the top and the bottom of the image. I then decided I would cut them out of the image and place them into a different background. The fact that they were interacting with each other essentially made them into one object, so it would have been easier for me to crop them out of the image.

Once they were cut out of the image, they looked like this:

Now that they were their own image with no background, I could manipulate the image and place it on top of another background.

I created a starburst-style background by taking a template from the internet and pasting in my own colours. I used the Magic Wand tool to select the area and then the Paint Bucket tool to past the image. I decided to use light blue and white for the pattern, as the bright colours help make the advert stand out.

I used the font 'Super Mario 256' for the text on the advertisement. I wrote "Video Games on BBC Cult" and "Bringing People Together" as separate text boxes so I could edit them individually. I used both the Free Transform tool and the Skew tool to manipulate the text to make it look over-dramatic and almost like a Japanese movie poster. This will attract the attention of people flicking through magazines, as the text takes up a lot of the screen.

I then added in the picture of Corey and Lucy and moved it around to fit alongside the text. I added 2 effects to the image "Bevel & Emboss" and "Drop Shadow". This helped the image stand out from the background and the text, making it the central focus of the advertisement.

I then just pasted in my already-created BBC Cult logo and the final document ended up looking like this:

Digital Graphics for Print | Production Log [Update 4]

I then started to create the final design for my bus advertisement. The first thing I needed to do was create the characters that were going to be used on the side of the bus. To do this, I used Adobe Photoshop and the pen tool to draw around images of the characters. This means I am creating my own original images and not using anything copy written.

I decided I would use bright and vibrant colours for each section of the characters, without using any complicated gradients or patterns. this allows the characters to stand out from the rest of the bus. I did this by using the paint bucket tool and selecting a colour from the original images with the paint dropper it gives you.

I also used this time to create the chair that will be repeated over and over on the side of the bus. I just took an image of a bus chair from the internet and traced over it just like with the characters.

     

After I created all the parts of the characters, I had to make sure that they were all layered correctly so there was no weird overlapping. By moving the layers up and down in the layer panel, it changed which objects appeared on top.


Once they were all completed, I grouped all the objects together in their own folders so they all move together. This way, the characters are all organised and I won't accidentally move individual parts.

I then opened up the bus template in a separate document and added a filter. I added the 'Patchwork' filter to make the bus look like it is pixelated. This fits with old-fashioned video games, as they were mainly 8 and 16 bit and full of pixels.

After that, I pasted the chairs in. I had to move certain ones higher up for certain characters, such as Sonic, as he has quite a short torso. The 1st and 4th chairs were over the wheels, so I had to use the polygon lasso tool combined with the eraser tool to cut them to the correct shape.

I then proceeded to copy the characters in one by one and placed them on the chairs. This was fairly simple to do, although I needed to use the brush tool to extend the colours on some of the characters, as the characters torsos were too short to reach the windows.

This is what the final design looked like: