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Graphic Design
War of the Worlds and It's a Wonderful Life
Wow, this was going to be a challenge. Two radio plays which are poles apart in their content, mood and imagery. Plus, to get across the 'radio play' element of the brief without hitting all the cliches!
The first thing I wanted to get right was the old fashioned style radio play poster. Working in 300dpi is fine but when you are searching for an extra large image of an old fashioned microphone it is like finding a needle in a haystack. Luckily, the image I eventually found was pretty much perfect.
Having chosen a creme colour as a base for my poster I put a gradient from orange to transparent over the top. Then I added a 'rising sun' at about 50% opacity. The microphone image was on a plain white background and so was easy to blend in. I created the border around the edge by placing a white rectangle over the top and reducing the opacity of that. This left the border around the edge just slightly darker. I think this really helps the overall look. I used the eraser tool to delete the bottom of the microphone image so that it appears to drop behind the border and added the text.
NB: The more eagle eyed (or awake) amongst you may notice that this image is used in this site. Although it is a lot more dirty in appearance.
The next section to try and tackle was the background. As I said before, this was a tough project because I needed to create two very different scenes and feels for each side of a single image. I hunted around and came back with a picture of a town. It was snowy and one side was bathed in light whilst the other side was in darkness.
I added the UFOs, lasers, fire and the moon, stars and snow on the backgrounds using various brushes and then added paint daub and posterisation filters to the final piece. This gives it a more 1950s 'hand drawn' feel. The two fonts were chosen to compliment the two different sides of the flyer. The 'War of the Worlds' text is 1950's comic book style and pretty close to the iconic font from the posters I have seen of this production. The font for 'It's a Wonderful Life' is script and I think quite 'Christmassy'.
The final step was to add the poster I created earlier, rotate it slightly and put a peeling corner effect on as I have explained in a previous post.
I really like the way this turned out. I considered making it a bit more 'grunge' at some points but I prefer it with the clean look. Let's call it '2008 Retro'.
Click on image to view large version (Lightbox)
