Concert Poster

Deciding how to approach this assignment was very difficult for me. I know I wanted to make Madonna pop off the page, but I had no idea how I was going to do it. I could not think of any other graphics that I would be able to make fit with the poster, so I decided to take up the majority of the space with a large image of Madonna.

When photo shopping the image of Madonna, I wanted to play with the colors. I did not like the way the image looked when I applied different filter effects, so I had to try to alter it in a different way. I used the Brightness/Contrast. I played with them until I found a spot that looked good, and made her stand out and look brighter. Then I used the magnetic lasso tool to crop around her body, which was surprisingly very easy to use. At first, I had the image on a hot pink background with yellow type, but there was something about it that I just did not like. I thought it was too boring and wanted it to be more exciting. I tried to add some fireworks, but they were nearly impossible to crop. Then I had the idea of adding spotlights, and found the image of the blue spotlights online. At first I cropped them, but they just did not look right against the pink background. I decided to make them the entire background, and had to resize the image to be at least 3400x5114 pixels. I had to keep going back to make it bigger and bigger because it would not fill up the entire Quark document. I then layered everything else on top of the spotlights, and was happy with the way it looked.

In my original draft the font was yellow on pink, but I thought it looked better as pink on black. I chose to do all caps with an Impact font, because it seemed to stand out on the page nicely. I wrote the headline at the top above Madonna’s head, and the remaining text at the bottom. I wanted to put the concert information on a slant, so that everything wasn’t the same.

I did not enjoy using Quark for this project. I feel as though Photoshop is more user-friendly. Every time I tried to move something on the page, I ended up moving the spotlight background by mistake. I also had difficulty figuring out how to apply different colors to the text, because there were only about five options on the toolbars. If I had the choice, I would definitely take Photoshop over Quark.