Project: Chess Flier

I was tasked with coming up with two fliers for two events at the work place. They were to be quick and fun. I used Illustrator CS2 and Photoshop CS2. All names will be changed or blurred out.

Take 1

The first is made of two images from photos.com. I deleted out the background of the knight in Photoshop. I placed both images in Illustrator and kept them so that they were linked. That way when I would change the image in Photoshop, it would automatically update in Illustrator. Very handy tool. I made a shadow with a gradient in Photoshop since Illustrator just wasn’t doing what I wanted.

• download meet the spartans movie

The knight’s shape seemed to cry out for words to wrap around the horse’s body. Doesn’t that space just scream “text”? So I tried that. I also put the word “Chess” behind to create some depth. It’s at about the same angle as the horse. I also wanted to break the frame but not amputate.

Take 2

Too loose. Not enough punch. Not enough contrast. I switched to all Impact font. I also put a gradient on the background to make that more interesting instead of 100% washout look. The horse was also increased in saturation in Photoshop. I liked the yellow so picked out a few key words to season a path with yellow. Impact font.

Take Done

After some great feedback, I moved stuff around yet again, but kept with the yellow seasoning. Also a great tip I got was to either have really light gray or a light tint of yellow when next to pure yellow. If it’s white next to yellow, the yellow looks dirty. So I substituted out the white font color for the lightest yellow I could get. I also used Caslon as a different text to add variety. I used Caslon because it’s serif and I had a sanserif. I remember my Typography class lessons.

(click for larger image)

PDF Too Big

To have our copy center print the fliers, I needed to make the file into PDF. And a small enough PDF file that could be uploaded through the web or emailed. But when I saved it as a PDF from Illustrator, the softness of the shadow was too harsh. Taught a neat trick: Export it to PSD, high quality and didn’t flatten. Open it in Photoshop. Save as JPG. Highest quality. Open that. Save as PDF ‘Smallest File Size’ setting. Weird thing is when I skip the JPG part, the text is too pixelated when I go from Photoshop -> PDF directly. Dunno. Interesting long path though but ended up with a small PDF with decent shadow fade and text. Not as crisp as directly from the Illustrator file though.