Sunday, January 25, 2015

Leisha's Mindforge Poster

For my poster I used a combination of both Pixlr and Sumopaint.  With the exception of a one week Photoshop assignment in my Educational Technology class, I've never used any sort of image editing software before, which meant that there was a significant learning curve when it came to using Sumopaint.  After some frustration I resorted to Pixlr to create the top image with the original cow and then transferred that image to Sumopaint, where I added the pie chart in place of the letter "o" in "Fractions", and added the rest of the wording and images for the poster.  I found Pixlr to be much more user friendly, which helped, because I'm so new at this.   
I wanted to keep the original cow (I mean, come on, he is really cute) but I wanted to change the color.  Red seemed really intense, and not exactly inviting.  I went with the blue because I think it is less harsh of a color.  The original intention was to have the dark blue offset by much lighter blues and white.  However, since I'm still new at this, all of my attempts to incorporate a lighter blue resulted in a very tacky picture.  I was hoping to use a lighter blue when I transferred the image to Sumopaint, but light blue font wasn't visible and when I tried to use a light blue background, it came out super tacky again.  From there I tried to go sort of minimalist with the dark blue font and white background.  Looking at it now I think it is all too dark and not the inviting blue I was trying to go for.  This picture might appeal to teachers, but not to the children ages 4-9.   
For the overall layout I stuck with the "Works Every Time" design, with the image first, headline, informational text aligned to the right, extra material on the left and the website/logo in the bottom right hand corner.  I used "Chalkduster" as the headline/product font to try and convey that this was a kids/educational program.  In order to make the white letters stand out more against the dark blue background, I used the paintbrush tool and outlined each letter to darken the pixels. To create a representative image, I used the pie shape piece in Sumopaint to replace the "O" in fractions.  I also searched Mindforge and found the Mindforge design logo, and the Dr. Toy Winner stamp, which I used in the bottom right portion of the poster.   
I'm upset that I feel like I had to compromise my original design because I could not get Sumopaint to cooperate.  It would freeze, or delete text, or fail to save layers, which was all very weird and frustrating.  By doing this assignment I learned what worked, what did not, and what I would change if I could do the assignment again.     

Images collected from  

1 comment:

  1. Leisha have you ever used lynda.com to get training on software? I know they do not have ALL the image software tutorials on there but they do have a good few including GIMP and Photoshop. Here is the link to the GIMP tutorial: http://www.lynda.com/course-tutorials/GIMP-Essential-Training/112673-2.html

    Best part is that as JMU students we have access!

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