by Sunday November 7th, 1pm, send your proposals in a form of hand drawings or digital sketches. I want to see many, minimum 5.

1. How to get a deeper understanding of the title.

  • Look at the title carefully, think about its meaning.
  • Choose the visual organization of the words in your title. For example, do you want to have one word per line or several?
  • Write the title down by hand on a piece of paper, do it several times to get a good feel of it.
  • What is its structure?
  • What are the most important words?
  • What does it make you think about?
  • Write down the meaningful words that you come up with, like “sad”, “peaceful”, “happy”.

2. How to find visual inspiration to help you develop ideas.

  • Do a quick visual Google search using the key words from the title.
  • Do a quick visual Google search using the key words you wrote down earlier.
  • Do a quick search on Pinterest using the key words from the quote and see if you find images
  • Do a quick search on Pinterest using the same words from above.
  • Create a Pinterest board for color inspiration. Find paintings, illustrations or photos, with colors expressing the mood of the title, like blue for peaceful or yellow for happy for example. Remember the video on the meaning of colors.
  • Create a Pinterest board for typography inspiration. Find posters, album covers, book covers, anything with typography that is expressing the mood of your title, like in the famous Blue Note album covers I placed on OpenLab.
  • After you gathered a bunch of documentation you will probably have a better idea of how to express your title with typography and color.

3. How to convince people about your ideas.

  • Write down a pitch, a couple of sentences, about what came up during your research.
  • What did you find about the title that made you like it?
  • What is the meaning of it, its message?
  • How do you want people to react when looking at your design. For example, should they smile, laugh, be touched or shocked?

4. How to look for a typography that will express your title? Start to set up your file and title.

  • Create an InDesign file that is 11X17″ with a bleed of 0.125″ around. See my tutorial video.
  • Copy and paste one of the previous step quote variation that you think work well with the meaning of the words.
  • Come up with a simple, not final visual concept.
  • Then grab all the elements on the page, copy and paste into a new page. (command A + Command C + Command V)
  • Change the font, make it all uppercase, or all lowercase, thin or bold, like the examples I showed you on the review video.

6. start to input colors and make more variations.

  • Pick a color palette from your research
  • Create one variation then it’s opposite, if it’s dark make it light.
  • Create a warm color variation then a cool color variation, just to see.

7. send me your 3 favorites, more if you feel like it. You know how I like seeing how creative you are.

I will post the steps for the postcard with an image in a little while. Or maybe you got the idea and can figure out how to do the same, but using the quote with an image this time.