My Design Process

To make this poster I firstly took into account that I was working at a very large scale, so I downloaded a picture of ET and vectorised it into a 6 colour shape using Illustrator by tracing it. This way I could have a picture of ET that could be scaled up to a very large size, and that was my own. I dragged the picture into photoshop and applied a gradient map to it that was red and black, to fit with the colour scheme.

After this I used the text tool to type out the title, and the character window to adjust it accordingly. The font I chose to use for the title was Akzidenz-Grotesk Pro Super as it was bold and stood out. I adjusted the typeface slightly by increasing the tracking, stretching the type to 120% wide, and making it red. I could do all of this in the character window.

After this I added some other text to the poster. I wanted the tagline at the top to look appealing so I looked for a font that looked good in lower and upper case. In the end I used Helvetica Neue Condensed Bold. The white tagline really stands out and contrasts against the red/black so that the audience see it. I also added production credits to make the poster look professional and realistic as this is something I left out in my first poster design I did at the start of my publishing lessons. I looked up what font is used for production credits, but the college computers didn't have it so I looked for a similar font. I ended up using Akzidenz-Grotesk Pro Light Condensed and again adjusted its tracking and size in the character window. It has a subscript button which was helpful in making certain words small.

Subscript Button

To finish off the production credits, I found some logos online to add to the bottom, such as the Dolby Logo, Rating, and Production Company Logo. The logos I found online were transparent however they were black so I inverted them to make them white. After this, I used the polygonal lasso tool to draw glasses and a hat on ET, by making a selection and using the paint bucket to fill the selection. I also added different coloured accents to the shapes I drew in the same way.

After this, I found a splattered brush that I could use to paint a beard onto ET to make it look like Leon. I painted it in three different shades of red to give it some definition.

Lastly, I added a black vignette to the poster to put behind the title. I did this by using the Rectangle Tool to make a black rectangle, then I used the Elliptical Marquee tool with a very large feather on it to cut half an oval out of the black shape. The finished poster looks good in my opinion and I think that by using a colour scheme it looks really effective.