Not long ago I was approached by my coworker with a commission for designing series of posters for her. I was delighted when I heard that, especially knowing her great taste in design! The brief was simple – 3 minimalistic posters that will be depicting things connected to her Erasmus trip to Sweden. She also had a quite good idea how she wants posters to look which made process even more enjoyable. Short brief I received:
Posters 1 & 3 – Dala horse with watercolor-style texture and delicate decorations + quote in Swedish
Poster 2 – Collection of quotes and buzzwords surrounding her trip and bringing back her memories
Inspiration material:
I loved the concept of posters immediately and quite quickly got to work. First thing to do was coming up with decorative elements to place on the horses. Those are sketches I provided my client with:
You can see ones she had chosen marked with an arrow : )
Based on those, I started to work on digital version. I used couple watercolor textures merged together and edited in Photoshop. After that I vectorize watercolor texture I created with Image Trace operation in Illustrator. That step was necessary since the poster was much bigger than textures size. Then I resized it to cover all the surface of the Dala horse.
The next step I did was creating vector representation of the designs I created for horses. I placed them then over the vector shape of a horse (which I created earlier and printed to sketch designs over).
After adding a quote the Dala horse posters were pretty much done. Then I moved on to middle poster with quotes. To fill them nicely on the surface I decided to create sort of labyrinth of words with different weights and sizes of same typeface. Then I empathized words that were most important with same red watercolor effect just as horses to tie all posters together with same theme.
My client was very satisfied with final outcome and I must say I think it ended up really good.
Final posters:
Font used: Nanami Pro
Hope you liked that project, I am really proud of how it went and I think my client feels the same. I hope I will get in future much more awesome projects to work on like this one! 🙂