Today’s plan
- Quick review of Gries
- Assignment One: Presidential Poster
- Obama Hope materials and processes
- Vector images and Adobe Illustrator
- Photoshop Friday (two projects)
Quick Review of Gries
In a minute I am going to ask you to unpack Gries’ discussion of the materials, technologies, and processes Fairey and others used to create Obama Hope. This will serve as a heuristic, or creative inventive method, for generating your own presidential poster (and should inform what you do to complete the Presidential Poster Research assignment).
I also wanted to highlight a few other more theoretical points in the Gries that deserve mention. First, there is the question of when “plagiarism” becomes “creativity.” Is Fairey’s Obama Hope poster an original work of art? Or is it a theft of Garcia’s photo? How do we begin to draw these lines (in the next chapter, Gries details how the AP sued Fairey, and how he chose to settle out of court for an undisclosed amount).
Presidential Poster Project (Major Project)
Our first major project this semester asks you to design and print a presidential poster in Photoshop. You will then print the poster. Some basic nuts and bolts:
- You should design the image in photoshop with a 300 pixel per inch resolution
- The image should be 11×17
- You need to save your image as a .psd file (preserving the layers) AND as a .tiff file (for printing)
I want us to spend today talking about how to make a presidential poster: what methods can we use? what do components do we need to think about? how can we familiarize ourselves with the genre. To help start this conversation, I want you to team up with another person and come up with 4 different possibilities from the Gries reading (specifically, pages 135-145). We’ll share your lists in class and try to generate a heuristic to aid invention.
I also want to have a few links ready:
- Perhaps your design process could be informed by a 20th century philosophy (or images from these movements–what happens if you search for existential images?)
- 12 Presidential Posters
- Some more presidential posters
- inside.gov on Presidential slogans
- 50 iconic images of the 21st century
- 21st century paintings
- Top visual ads of the 20th / 21st century
And I’m thinking about this tutorial for Thursday’s class.
- Past influences, an inspirational image or tradition
- Street Art, guerilla art, the obey campaign, propaganda
- A design aesthetic: minimalism, 1960’s music posters, etc.
- a philosophy phenomenology (for critical thinking), existentialism (for individuality), or even an important historic or literary quote (think juxtaposition)
- a photo, a pose of the candidate–thinking about the angle of the photo, the look on the face, where the eyes are pointing, thinking about lighting, background, etc
- Consluting the campaign for logo, language, goals, etc. Consulting other websites (huff post, breibart, american conservative, slate) for perceptions of the candidate. Google searches for “the biggest campaign challenge X faces” etc.
- Color scheme, greyscale, ect.
- Typographic choices
- Magic square decisions. Building around the rule of thirds
Presidential Poster Research (Assignment)
There is an assignment thread in Canvas called Presidential Poster Research. I would like you to take 45 minutes and start putting together material for your poster. You can collect links to sites (but please write a sentence or two per link *or more* about how this is valuable), images (or links to images), google searches for key terms or more material, campaign research, third-party research, research on design, typography, etc.
Note that you can and should use the material we generate in class today to help with this assignment. You can do the assignment directly in Canvas or you can do it in Google Docs or Microsoft Word and upload a file. The purpose of this assignment is to help you document your process and workflow, and to keep track of the time you invest in the project. Developing systematic ways of tracking your work, and vocabulary for discussing your design process is an essential part of growing as a professional writer.
NOTE: Please use tinyurl.com for long links. And please hotlink URL’s (using the chain icon, don’t just paste in a long URL).
Vector Images in/and Adobe Illustrator
The rest of chapter six might not have had too much inventive material for making a poster, but it did raise a number of interesting questions regarding visual rhetoric. But there was one significant technological point: the difference between a raster image and a vector image (page 146). Gries notes that this was a key step in David Erasti’s enlarging and distributing Obama Hope posters. Since you are making posters, and likely working with smaller web images, you’ll need how to do this.
First, let’s get a sense of the difference between raster images and vector images. Given the dimensions of this project (11×17, with a 300 pixel resolution), you will likely need to increase the size of any image you want to use in your poster. To do this, you will likely need to convert a raster image into a vector, otherwise your image will pixelate horribly. Unfortunately, you can’t do this in Photoshop without using a plug-in. But, fortunately, this is easy to do in Adobe Illustrator and we have access to Illustrator in this lab and via the USF APP portal. To be honest, most people design documents for print in Illustrator, not Photoshop (they often edit the images in Photoshop and then import and arrange them in Illustrator). In an effort to minimize the technologies we have to learn, I focused on Photoshop. But I encourage you to mess around with Illustrator, it has virtually the same interface and options as Photoshop, with a few other print-friendly features.
Here’s some instructions for converting an image from raster to vector in Illustrator.
Again, to keep things a bit easier I am not requiring Illustrator. But, depending on the images you find and their pixel size and resolution, you might need to enlarge a .jpeg or .png image, and that will require transforming it into a vector so that it doesn’t pixelate.
Photoshop Tutorials
As advertised, today we are going to work through two tutorials that aim to expand your comfort and abilities with Photoshop.
- First, Phlearn’s Image and Text tutorial [this one took us longer than I expected last class]
- Second, Blue Lightning TV’s Obama Hope tutorial (so I don’t know if we will have time to get through this one).
1:35? Time to Ship It
Since we are only working with two images today, I don’t think you need to .zip them (you can if you want). But you should be able to upload two images to the Photoshop #2 workshop in Canvas.
Homework
There’s a few things to do this weekend:
- First, finish doing your presidential campaign research, working through the list of materials and processes that we made during our last class. You will find where to turn this in on canvas.
- Second, convert one raster image into a vector image in Illustrator and then open and edit it in Photoshop. This can either be practice, or you can start working on your poster.
- Third, I am changing the reading assignment from the syllabus. Since many of you are ready to draft your poster, I want you to read White Space chapters 5 (layout) and 14 (printing a document). When it comes time to write up your process, I will ask you to explicate how specific design principles in White Space impacted your design and execution. At this point, you should have read Chapters 1-3, 5, and 14 in White Space. We will work with chapter 4 of White Space in next week’s class, so please bring the book with you.
