Jen's Mindforge Poster

Hi all!  I tried to do a lot of brainstorming before beginning my actual poster, which was a good thing because I changed my mind some many times!  Here's a picture of my chicken scratch!

I designed my poster for a teacher/parent audience, and not specifically for kids.  At fist, I played around with using a balloon image where the balloon would be sectioned into a pie chart.  I was going to have a tag line say, "Up your fraction game."  I gave up on this concept, however, because I ultimately didn't find that the balloon/pie chart idea really translated that well.  Then, I began to play around with new names for the software.  I came up with several ideas, but Fract/Fun was the one that clicked.  (The line between the words, is supposed to be a fraction line.)  The tag line, "Play Math.  Learn a Ton." immediately came to me.  I loved it because it conveys that math can be learned via playing games....and, it rhymes.  Bonus.  :)

I tested out a bunch of poster making software before I began, as I hadn't heard of a lot of them.  I looked at Smore, Posterini, Postermywall, Sumopaint, and Pixlr.  The first three were too "template-based" for what I wanted to create.  I ended up using Sumopaint, Illustrator, and Photoshop to create or tweak graphics.  I used InDesign to layout my final product.  I was not very familiar with any of these programs, except for Illustrator and Photoshop, which I used once last semester in Dr. Wilcox's class.  I found Photoshop and Sumopaint to be fairly similar in their interface.  I like working within layers.  Sumopaint, however, gave me some trouble.  First, when I was working with multiple layers, it sometimes didn't show me which object was selected at any given time, which made it kind of hard to build complex shapes.  Also, it was also unable to upload several of the larger resolution graphics that I wanted to tweak.  I tried to download the program, but you have to pay for the pro version.  Photoshop was great, although it definitely has a steeper learning curve.  I used Photoshop to create the Fract/Fun banner at the top of the arcade.  Once I had all of my images finished, I created my poster in InDesign. InDesign also has a steep learning curve.  However, I was able to watch a couple brief YouTube videos and learn enough to do my simple layout.

For the aesthetics of my poster, I started by picking a color palette.  I chose this palette, because it had so many vibrant colors and it seemed very kid-friendly.  I created all of my images using source images that I downloaded from Vectorstock.  I definitely wanted the poster to convey a gaming theme.  I found an arcade graphic, changed it to my color palette, and then added the cow, pizza, talking bubble, and big title on the top.  For the poster background, I designed a graphic that uses blocks to create a top and bottom border.  I used these blocks because they seemed like video game pieces and they also convey the theme of "building."  Since this software aims to build knowledge, it seemed like a perfect fit.  Lastly, I selected my fonts.  I settled on Orbitron because it looks like an arcade/robotic font.  I used it for all of the main text.  Next, I went through my font library to try and find one that paired well with Orbitron.  I thought Ubuntu Condensed was a nice complement.  I used that for all of the secondary text.

The only thing that I'm not totally happy with is the layout of the secondary text, bullet points, and logo.  I tried a one-colum layout, and that seemed worse.  I tried putting the bullet points on the right side and the text on the left.  Ultimately, I think that I would change up the logo and then re-work the layout.  Anyhow, here's how it turned out: