1. Introduction

1.1 Introduction

Hi there, and welcome to this Tuts+ course, How to Create a Typographic Poster. My name is Laura Keung, and I am a graphic designer based in Germany. Posters are one of the earliest forms of advertisement. They're one of the most eye-catching pieces of design. They're everywhere. And in order to engage viewers, posters need to be well thought out, legible, and attractive. In this course, we will focus on the basics of creating a complete typographic poster. We will look for inspiration on the Envato Elements website, set up a ready-to-print Photoshop file, and develop an attractive composition as we cover different tools in Adobe Photoshop. You will not only learn about how to create an impactful minimalist poster, but one that will also be technically correct for professional printing and online sharing. I am excited to get started, and I look forward to seeing you in the course.

1.2 The Creative Process

Hi everyone, welcome back to this course. Let's kick things off by looking into the creative process of designing a typographic poster. In this lesson, we will take a look into finding inspiration, finding fonts, and creating a headline for our poster. We are on the Envato Elements website, and this is a great library that is updated weekly with really good quality images, fonts, videos, and templates. So let's take a look at the photo section, and we can already see that they have themed collections. And our aim right now is to look for any kind of images that jump to our eyes. So I see a lot of color in the Seascapes collection. I'll go into that, and like I mentioned, we just need to scout for images that are interesting to us. For example, I find this image here interesting. And what I find interesting about it is the color and the strings are floating away. So for me it's very, this image is very pleasing, so I will download it. And the great thing about the Envato Elements website is that you can download images without a license to comp them first or try them on, on your project. And once you decide to use them, you can license them. So let's go back into the section here. And let's keep finding images. Now, there's no such thing as too many images or the right or wrong images. I believe that the more images that you can get, the more your creativity can expand because you can see what the possibilities are. So I'll get as many images as I can in different varieties. Now, in the real world, you would usually get a creative brief from your client. And this is where you would get some information and some inspiration from for the poster. But because we don't have that, this is a fictional poster. So we are our own client and we get to make those decisions. The great thing is that we can push the envelope as far as we want. So let's keep finding some more images. So let's take a look at what kind of images we've collected. And we have a theme going on, which is great. We have a lot of color, a lot of movement, and seascape. So to find a font, we need to keep these things in consideration because we don't want to use a font that is clashing with our images. So let's go into the font section. And let's take a look, At what we've got. So something like this, or this, would have too much personality. And we want to find something neutral, so maybe let's take a look at the sans-serif category and see what we can find. Fonts like this are perfect because they come across as friendly because they're rounded. So let's download this. Without a license and let's go back. Something like this would also be great mainly because it's just a neutral font, a traditional classic font that will blend well with our poster. So let's download that one as well. And the great thing about here is that you can go into the designer's other fonts, and I'm already seeing something that I like, and that would be this. I like the disruptive alternates. And the alternates would be a second option to a character. So for example, this is a regular H, and this will be its alternate. Or for example, here is the E, and this will be its alternate. So I think this would work great for our poster because it gives us more room to play. Let's download that one as well. And let's take a look at what we have. So we have many images, and we have about three fonts here that we can work with. The way I like to tackle the headline is, I look at all the images that I have and think of the words that I could come up with to describe them. And we can go into our browser and type fish synonym. Or we can even type fish and the meaning. Even though we already know the meaning of the word, it's good to read and see what other words are related to it. So for example here, catch, we try to catch. Concealed, search. Thesaurus and dictionary.com are really good options for this because it just gives us so many words that we can play with for a headline. So let's go into the dictionary.com. And this doesn't have to be anything complicated. Sometimes just the simplest words can lead us to something really good. And I can already see something that's calling my attention, and that would be aquatic. And something helpful to do is to visualize the word on a poster to see how the forms are going to look like the letter forms. Nautical is another great word. So let's try to go with aquatic, and there is no right or wrong here. You can go for, really, any headline that will make sense for the poster. So I see aquatic, I see life, I really like the word life. And let's go back here, and we have lots of life and movement and color. We can use aquatic, aquatic life in color, aquatic life in motion would also be great because there is so much movement with the fish. So let's go with that. Let's try to go with aquatic life in color, or aquatic life in motion. I think we have two great options there. We have a really good selection of fonts, images, and a couple of headlines. In the next lesson, I will show you how to go about the process of elimination to choose the right elements for our poster. I'll see you there.