Assignment 5 - Music Festival Postcard

In the second class for visual elements and principle design, Dr Julian taught us colours; colour basics, colour contrast and colour harmony, and colour psychology. I understood why I had to use RGB for web designs and CMYK for print (additive and subtractive), the difference between saturation (think: shade) and hue (think: colour), and The Colour Wheel.

In the softwares, I used the colour swatches to apply different colour schemes to my designs.

Brief

§

Design a postcard about a music festival without the use of photographs and explore different colour schemes.

Objective:
– Developing necessary skill in using colour palette
– Developing necessary techniques in communicating the message through colours
– Understanding process of colour scheme selection and usage

Thought process

I was very keen on using the outlines of musical instruments for my postcard because of simplicity and serenity that music provides.

I picked three musical instruments: a piano, a cello and a saxophone because they are classical and common musical instruments.

Design process

What I did:

I put together the outlines of a piano, cello, saxophone and a music score to my design. I chose design 5 as the final piece.

Problems/Solutions:

• I ran out of colour schemes to try out (at least the colour schemes that I thought suited the design and theme). Therefore, I experimented with changing the background colour.
• I wanted to have gradient fills for some of the outline but was not sure as to how to go about doing it.

Feedback:

1. Decrease the outline for the piano
2. Try more colour schemes
3. Increase contrast of colours
4. The back design of the postcard could include more details such as the time and date of the festival.

Changes I made:

• For designs 1-3, I added fills for the instruments.
• For designs 4-6, I added fills for the piano.
• For designs 7-9, I changed the backgrounds.
• For designs 10-12, I added gradient for the outline.
• Added time and date details for the festival on the back of the postcard.

Problems/Solutions:

• For designs 10-12, I figured out how to achieve the gradient outline effect. I copied the white paths from Illustrator onto Photoshop, used Magic Wand to delete the white outline, used a rectangle tool to create a gradient background and arranged the layers so that the gradient would appear behind the now-empty white outlines.