POSTER DESIGN ( UNIT-3)

A film poster. 

Poster design is always an integral part of Designers profile. Posters can be designed for Movies, for events, invitations or just for personal inspiration. What ever may be the reason, but you need to make sure the design is convincing to the client for the user because we can’t force them to think from our mind. Artistic Poster design should be both different as well as easy to understand.

Basic principles

A poster is a visual presentation of information and should be designed as such - do not simply reproduce your written paper in poster format.

It should be understandable to the reader without verbal comment - someone might look at it while you are talking to another delegate, or while you're in the toilet.

Remember, you are trying to catch the delegate's attention.

Content of the poster

Make sure the title and author's name are prominent and eye-catching

Tell a story: provide clear flow of information from introduction to conclusion

Focus on your major findings - a common fault is to try to cover too much. Few delegates are going to read everything on your poster, so get to the point.

Use graphs, tables, diagrams and images where appropriate. Use boxes to isolate and emphasize specific points.

Always follow the conference guidelines, which may be specific about what you are expected to present.

Tips for good poster

- Use all the space at your disposal, but do not cram in the content - white space is an important part of the layout, and good use of it can make a poster elegant and arresting.

- Use color sparingly - limited use of a few colors is more striking than a 'rainbow' approach. Think about why you are using color; it is especially useful for emphasis and differentiation.

- Avoid color combinations that clash (e.g. red on blue) or cause problems for people with color-blindness (e.g. red and green in proximity).

- Use white or muted color background (e.g. pastel shades)

- The flow of information should be clear from the layout; if you have to use arrows to indicate the flow, the content could probably be arranged better.

- Clearly label diagrams/drawings and provide references to them in the text where necessary.

- Again, follow the conference guidelines, which may be quite specific about paper sizes, font sizes etc.

- The title text should be readable from 6 metres away - at least 48-point text. (Note that if you are creating your poster in A4 format, to be blown up to A1 format later, the final printed font size will be approximately 3 times the size you are working with.)

- The body text should be readable from 2 metres away - at least 24-point text

Choose a clear font with large inner space (i.e. the space inside the loops of letters such as 'o', 'd', 'p'). Good examples are Arial, Verdana, Georgia or Helvetica.

- Keep the word count as low as possible.

Creating your poster

You can use Microsoft Word or PowerPoint to create your poster. These are not graphical layout applications, but they are adequate in most cases. In PowerPoint, create your poster as a single slide. You can set the page size when you start using File > Page Setup, so if you want an A1 poster (594mm × 840mm), you can specify this before you start (there may not be an A1 option, but you can enter the dimensions manually).

PowerPoint also allows you to add guidelines to help you line up the poster elements. Use View > Grid and Guides... and tick the Display grid on screen box.

In Ms Word, create your poster as a single side of A4. You can always scale it up when you come to print it. Word does not have guidelines as such, but you can get a grid by showing the Drawing toolbar (View > Toolbars > Drawing) which will probably appear at the bottom of the screen, then from that toolbar choose Draw > Grid... and tick the Display gridlines on screen box.

In both applications, use the Drawing toolbar to add text boxes to the screen. This allows you to control the way the text is positioned on the page.

MAKE PDF FILE - When the poster is designed, you should convert it to PDF for printing, using PDF Creator or Adobe Acrobat. The conversion process can be problematic: edges of words and images may be cut off near to the margins, images may appear degraded or misshapen, poster elements may have shifted and become overlapping. However, by ironing out these problems at the conversion stage, you avoid nasty surprises later when you come to print it out. When the PDF looks good, you can be pretty confident that the printed version will also be OK.

BROCHURE DESIGN (UNIT-3)

Brochure design 

Brochure design is a powerful offline marketing tool that can give a huge fillip to a marketing campaign if it can be employed properly. As it represents the brand image of an organization, you need to make it look as impressive as possible.

 Brochure design is a key component to the marketing of many businesses large and small. A well-designed brochure can present a positive image of the business while providing helpful information about the products or services offered.

First impression of company

Brochure acts as a first impression of your company for many. You need to make sure that it’s giving off the right message and reflecting the positive, forward-thinking brand image that you wish to promote. Feast your eyes on the superbly designed and printed brochures below. They’ll act as a source of inspiration for all your future printing endeavors.

Professional, innovative and catchy brochures always get a business noticed. To leave a lasting and notable impression, we all keep on bringing advancements to our marketing strategies. Just like business cards, brochures and booklets are a standard tool for promotion and advertising. 

Brochure should have a clean structure and should not include a wide array of graphic elements just for sake of giving it a different look. The purpose of designing a brochure is to establish a visual combination with the visitors through the use of images, text and symbols. Since it is a compilation of a number of different graphical elements, you need to be a little careful while designing a corporate brochure or professional brochure.

TOOL OF ADVT- Advertisements play an important role in marketing a product or service. The presentation of the advertisement is essential in ensuring that the target market is able to understand its message and eventually motivates them to purchase a product or use a service. Advertising also comes in various shapes and sizes and is often seen in the form of brochures.

Even a five-star hotel may not enjoy that status for long if it fails to convey the quality of its services through marketing mediums, especially hotel brochures. Find out the many ways other hotels have succeeded in stamping their own elegant identities through brochures.

Industrial brochures often put emphasis on the beauty of new technology. The key to selling the products you manufacture is by making your brochures look as marketable as possible.

Bold and Beautiful

- Your marketing brochure is the next best thing to your business card. But, it doesn’t have to be plain and boring to look professional.

- Add a splash of color

- Play with different kinds of type and experiment with folds

- Turn your brochures into eye candies that instantly persuade clients to do exactly what you want. 

WHAT IS LOGO (unit 3)

Logo is a graphic mark or emblem commonly used by commercial enterprises, organizations and even individuals to aid and promote instant public recognition. At the level of mass communication and in common usage a company's logo is today often synonymous with its trademark or brand.
Logos are either purely graphic (symbols or icons) or are composed of the name of the organization (  a logotype or word mark). In the days of hot metal typesetting, a logotype was a uniquely set and arranged typeface.

HISTORY
Numerous inventions and techniques have contributed to the contemporary logo, including cylinder seals (c.2300 BCE), coins (c.600 BCE), trans-cultural diffusion of logographic languages, coats of arms,  watermarks,  silver hallmarks and the development of printing technology.
As the industrial revolution converted western societies from agrarian to industrial in the 18th and 19th centuries, photography and lithography contributed to the boom of an advertising industry that integrated typography and imagery together on the page. Simultaneously, typography itself was undergoing a revolution of form and expression that expanded beyond the modest, serif typefaces used in books, to bold, ornamental typefaces used on broadsheet posters.

The First logo to be trademarked was the Bass red triangle in 1876
The Arts and Crafts Movement of late-19th century, partially in response to the excesses of Victorian typography, aimed to restore an honest sense of craftsmanship to the mass-produced goods of the era.[10] A renewal of interest in craftsmanship and quality also provided the artists and companies with a greater interest in credit, leading to the creation of unique logos and marks.
By the 1950s, Modernism had shed its roots as an avant-garde artistic movement in Europe to become an international, commercialized movement with adherents in the United States and elsewhere. The visual simplicity and conceptual clarity that were the hallmarks of Modernism as an artistic movement formed a powerful toolset for a new generation of graphic designers "Less is more." Modernist-inspired logos proved successful in the era of mass visual communication ushered in by television, improvements in printing technology, and digital innovations.

Logos today
The current era of logo design began in the 1950s. A paradigmatic contemporary logo is the Chase Bank logo, designed in 1960 by Chermayeff & Geismar, considered pioneers of Modernist graphic design in the United States. The Chase logo was “the first truly abstract logo”  of the contemporary era. As would happen with many subsequent corporate logos, mass media advertising was used to link the logo with the bank in the public mind, while its simple, distinctive form, free of specific cultural or other connotations, was well suited to represent a complex, multinational corporation.
Today there are many corporations, products, brands, services, agencies and other entities using an ideogram (sign, icon) or an emblem (symbol) or a combination of sign and emblem as a logo. As a result, only a few of the thousands of ideograms people see are recognized without a name. An effective logo may consist of both an ideogram and the company name (logotype) to emphasize the name over the graphic, and employ a unique design via the use of letters, colors, and additional graphic elements.

Logo design
Logo design is an important area of graphic design, and one of the most difficult to perfect. The logo ( ideogram), is the image embodying an organization. Because logos are meant to represent companies' brands or corporate identities and foster their immediate customer recognition, it is counterproductive to frequently redesign logos.

Color is considered important to brand recognition, but it should not be an integral component to the logo design, which could conflict with its functionality. Some colors are formed / associated with certain emotions that the designer wants to convey. For instance loud primary colors, such as red, are meant to attract the attention of drivers on highways are appropriate for companies that require such attention. In the United States red, white, and blue are often used in logos for companies that want to project patriotic feelings. Green is often associated with the health and hygiene sector, and light blue or silver is often used to reflect diet foods. For other brands, more subdued tones and lower saturation can communicate reliability, quality, relaxation, or other traits.

The logo design profession has substantially increased in numbers over the years since the rise of the Modernist movement in the United States in the 1950s. Three designers are widely considered the pioneers of that movement and of logo and corporate identity design: The first is Chermayeff & Geismar, which is the firm responsible for a large number of iconic logos, such as Chase Bank (1964), Mobil Oil (1965), NBC (1984), PBS (1986), National Geographic (2003) and others.
Due to the simplicity and boldness of their designs, many of their earlier logos are still in use today. The firm recently designed logos for the Library of Congress and the fashion brand Armani Exchange. Another pioneer of corporate identity design is Paul Rand, who was one of the originators of the Swiss Style of graphic design. He designed many posters and corporate identities, including the logos for IBM, UPS, and ABC. Rand died in 1996. The third pioneer of corporate identity design is Saul Bass. Bass was responsible for several recognizable logos in North America, including both the Bell Telephone logo (1969) and successor AT&T globe (1983).

Logo Design Process
Designing a good logo is not a simple task and requires a lot of involvement from the marketing team and the design agency (if outsourced). It requires clear idea about the concept and values of the brand as well as understanding of the consumer or target group as marketers call. Broad step in logo design process would be formulating concept, doing initial sketch, finalizing the logo concept, deciding the theme colors and format.
Psychology of Symbols
The effective design and use of a logo employs the understanding of human behavior. Whether cultural, or internal, people recognize and react to color, shapes, lines, fonts and other symbolic forms with emotions tied to their experiences.

Colors have a broad range of meaning according to different nations and cultures. A color could mean one thing in a particular setting, and something completely different in another.
People’s minds have been trained to recognize the motion of a line. Horizontal lines often communicate a leveled security. Vertical lines convey dignity, and diagonal lines are full of energy, suggesting either rising or falling, or movement in one direction or another.
By the early 21st century, large corporations such as MTV, Google, Morton Salt and Saks Fifth Avenue had adopted dynamic logos that change over time from setting to setting.
Internet Compatible Logos

A company that use logotypes (word marks) may desire a logo that matches the firm's Internet Address. For short logotypes consisting of two or three characters, multiple companies are found to employ the same letters. A "CA" logo, for example, is used by the French Bank Credit Agricole, the Dutch Clothing Retailer C&A and the US Software Corporation CA Technologies, but only one can have the internet domain name CA.com.

In today's interface adaptive world, the use of a logo will be formatted and re-formatted from large monitors to small handheld devices. With the constant size change and re-formatting, logo designers are shifting to a more bold and simple approach, with heavy lines and shapes, and solid colors. This reduces the confusion when mingled with other logos in tight spaces and when stretched and squeezed between mediums.

VISUAL AND EDITING (UNIT-3)

A Visual  is worth thousand words

Visual is a strong source of mass communication.  Mankind has been a maker of images at least since the cave paintings of some 20,000 years ago. A visual tells a story just as well as a large amount of descriptive text.  A picture is worth thousand words. This phrase emerged in the USA in the early part of the 20th century. Its introduction is widely attributed to Frederick R. Barnard, who published a piece commending the effectiveness of graphics in advertising with the title One look is worth a thousand words in december’1921.

WHAT IS VISUAL

The visual system in humans allows individuals to assimilate information from the environment. The act of  seeing starts when the lens of the eye focuses an image of its surroundings onto a light-sensitive membrane in the back of the eye, called the retina There were two major ancient Greek schools, providing a primitive explanation of how vision is carried out in the body.

VISUAL ARTS

The visual arts are art forms. Such as ceramics, drawing, painting, sculpture, print making, design, crafts, photography, video, filmmaking and architecture. Many artistic disciplines (performing arts, conceptual art, textile arts) involve aspects of the visual arts as well as arts of other types. Also included within the visual arts are the applied arts  such as industrial design, graphic design, fashion design, interior design and decorative art.

You can find strong use of visuals in fields like - 

Ceramics

Drawing

 Painting

Sculpture

Print making

Design

Crafts

Photography

Video

Filmmaking

Architecture.

DRAWING OF VISUAL

Drawing is a means of making an image, using any of a wide variety of tools and techniques.

It involves making marks on a surface by applying pressure from a tool, or moving a tool across a surface using dry media such as graphite pencils, pen and ink, inked brushes, wax color pencils, crayons, charcoals, pastels, and markers. Digital tools that simulate the effects of these are also used. The main techniques used in drawing are: line drawing, hatching, cross hatching,  random hatching, scribbling, stippling, and blending. An artist who excels in drawing is referred to as a draftsman or draughtsman.

What is Visual Literacy

The term “Visual Literacy” was first coined in 1969 by John Debes. Visual Literacy refers to a group of vision-competencies a human being can develop by seeing and at the same time having and integrating other sensory experiences. The development of these competencies is fundamental to normal human learning. When developed, they enable a visually literate person to discriminate and interpret the visible actions, objects, symbols, natural or man-made, that he encounters in his environment. Through the creative use of these competencies, he is able to communicate with others. Through the appreciative use of these competencies, he is able to comprehend and enjoy the masterworks of visual communication.

PHOTOGRAPHY

The word photography comes from two ancient Greek words: photo, for "light," and graph, for "drawing." "Drawing with light" is a way of describing photography. When a photograph is made, light or some other form of radiant energy, such as X rays, is used to record a picture of an object or scene on a light-sensitive surface. Early photographs were called sun pictures, because sunlight itself was used to create the image. With the invention of photography, a realistic image that would have taken a skilled artist hours or even days to draw could be recorded in exact detail within a fraction of a second.

Powerful means of Communication

Today, photography has become a powerful means of communication and a mode of visual expression that touches human life in many ways. For example, photography has become popular as a means of crystallizing memories.    Most of the billions of photographs taken today are snapshots--casual records to document personal events such as vacations, birthdays, and weddings.

Photographs are used extensively by newspapers, magazines, books, and television to convey information and advertise products and services.    Practical applications of photography are found in nearly every human endeavor from astronomy to medical diagnosis to industrial quality control. Photography extends human vision into the realm of objects that are invisible because they are too small or too distant, or events that occur too rapidly for the naked eye to detect. A camera can be used in locations too dangerous for humans. Photographs can also be objects of art that explore the human condition and provide aesthetic pleasure. For millions of people, photography is a satisfying hobby or a rewarding career.

PHOTOGRAPHY IS ART  

Today photography is widely recognized as a fine art. Photographs are displayed in art museums, prized by collectors, discussed by critics, and studied in art history courses.

In the early days of photography some people considered the medium something of a poor relation to the older, established visual arts, such as drawing and painting.    The arguments stemmed from the fact that a camera is a mechanical instrument. Because the mechanical procedure of taking a picture is automatic, detractors claimed that photography required no coordination of hand and eye and none of the manual skills essential to drawing and painting.

The Kodak Era   

In the 1880s the American George Eastman  put flexible roll film on the market, and in 1889 he introduced the first Kodak camera with the slogan, "You push the button and we do the rest." Thus was launched the era of mass-market photography.   Meanwhile, gifted photographers were exploring the new medium from a creative standpoint, attempting to discover its potential and limitations and define photography as an art form. At first it was only natural that photographers should take their inspiration from painting. Oscar G. Rejlander and Henry Peach Robinson, for example, working in England, used various darkroom techniques, tricks, and manipulations to produce staged photographs that frankly imitated the sentimental, moralistic paintings of the era.

Photography in Communication

Power of Communication 

Since its invention in 1839, photography's unique powers of visual description have been used to record, report, and inform. People prefer to see things with their own eyes, but when this is impossible the camera can often serve the same purpose almost as well. It is not true that photographs never lie. They can be falsified and manipulated. Nevertheless, a photograph can carry a strong measure of authenticity and conviction.

What is Photo Editing?

The most important part of shooting pictures often involves work after they have been shot! Post processing photo editing has become the anthem for many professional photographers. Even after shooting good pictures they need to make them great. This is where photo editing is applied. Under the canopy of this broad term ‘photo editing’ several enhancement can be done to make a picture that has already been shot more valuable and attract. Photo editing is a simple and also a complex process that is performed in a studio with software like Photoshop or GIMP. The software supports many features that are useful in photo editing.

In digital photo editing, one can easily do the following things smartly to make a difference to processed pictures. These are the simple processes done with the software, virtually by every editor.

1 Noise reduction

2 White Balance

3 Contrast

4 Exposure

5 Lens correction

6 Color adjustments

7 Resizing and cropping

8 Background removal

The complex and advanced techniques include:

1 Simple to complex clipping path techniques

2 Portrait corrections

3 Drop and reflection shadow

4 Special Effects

5 Adjusting text and visuals

6 Photo stitching

7 Photo  masking and layers

8 Manipulation

Enhancement and retouching

Photo editing is a beautiful process that removes most blemishes and unwanted objects from digital photos. Now that such photos are used for e-commerce, print media, posters and advertising, making impressive catalogues it has versatile application across industries. To achieve the above work, the photo editing professionals have to use the correct software. There are many kinds of software that have been introduced for professional editors. Regularly new features are added to make the work better. 

Photo editing software  

Photo editing software  is an essential part of everyday post processing work. adobe photoshop is popular  photo editing software. Adobe Photoshop is a raster graphics editor developed and published by Adobe Systems for Windows and OS X. Photoshop was created in 1988 by Thomas and John Knoll. Since then, it has become the de facto industry standard in raster graphics editing, such that the terms "photoshopping" and "photoshop contest" were born.

For online photo editing you can try -

http://www.fotor.com/   www.befunky.com/   http://web.photocat.com/