Design Process of Market Day Poster

In this post I will go through my process of designing a poster for a school’s annual market day. The poster had to be A3 in size and had to grab your attention.

As the school couldn’t afford to let the posters be professionally designed and printed, they had to find sponsors. Poldaw Wind Pumps is a local business and they paid me to design the poster. The other sponsors were Afgri Frankfort and Studio Print.

Sketching my ideas

I first started sketching ideas in my notebook. I sketched what I wanted the words “market day” to look like, and how I wanted the layout to look like.

The pattern idea I got from a wallpaper I saw in a lounge.

Designing on the computer

Once I knew what I wanted to do, I opened CorelDraw and started designing. What I like about using a vector-based program is that the file size stays very small even if you work on a large document like an A3. If I worked in Photoshop, the file size would have been very large.

Colour choices

The organisers wanted the poster’s background to be yellow with black text. Yellow on black / black on yellow is visible from far away. I made the frame with the pattern orange, because I thought it would give energy. Orange also evokes a feeling of fun.

Read about the meanings of colour.

I made the pattern myself using spirals.

The colours I used were yellow, orange, green and blue. At first I only used the first three colours, but I put in some blue and it made the area around the header pop. Yellow, orange, green and blue work together because they are next to each other on the colour wheel.

Layout

The body text was aligned with guidelines so that each word fits into a specific space. I think it looks very neat and modern.

The final poster design

Here is a photo I took of the finished poster in a shop window. This poster was done in Afrikaans. The English meaning of some of the words you see there are: stands, demonstrations, school reunions and netball game.

This poster was a lot of fun for me to work on. Your comments are welcome!