How a poster gets done at Shaastra: 1

I have been in the business of getting designs done since three years now. It took off in a structured manner in my third year when I was the only guy who knew Photoshop and knew how to imagine. Later, in my fourth year and now in my fifth year I have been leading teams. Let me call them the creative teams. I expanded the team from a small group of six graphic artists (read those who could work on photoshop) to a now a dozen folks, with almost half of them having no clue about the designing software. But believe me, when it comes to shooting ideas, they simply make you fall in love with their creativity.

You pretty much know the background now. Before I begin, this post is a step by step live update on how few posters are being worked upon right now.

1. Objective

I met my team for the first time this semester this Friday evening. It was supposed to be a ‘welcome back, let’s rock’ kinda meet where I told them about the work that lay ahead. I asked them to go back and think of ideas for two posters in the short term. The next meeting was scheduled for Saturday afternoon.

2. Brainstorming

My wonderful team had loads of ideas to offer the next day. We did some brainstorming and the way it always happens, given the time constraint, I picked the best amongst all that came out after the session.

I can go ahead and write about all the ideas that were discussed but don’t really see the point. So let me just talk about the two ideas that we settled on, as a team.

Idea 1

The poster has a picture. The picture is that of a student holding a newspaper with his face pressed against it. The newspaper’s header has Shaastra and logo, and the pages display more content on Shaastra. So in effect, the poster supposedly represents the ‘spirit of engineering’ which is what Shaastra is all about. Alright. Now, this picture shows that the guy poked his face inside the newspaper so much that, he ended up tearing the paper! 😛 I know that’s funny but it passes a message: Truly, Madly, Deeply – in love with engineering. Done.

Idea 2

The poster is equally divided into three strips. The first strip has couple of small pictures (in black line drawings) which depict the progress of intelligence and activities which show major breakthrough events that mankind has seen (stuffs like discovery of fire et all). And the strip also says somewhere in BOLD: We celebrate intelligence. The strip below it again has similar boxes, but with pictures this time showing the progress of hardcore science. And the tagline for this strip is: We celebrate Science. The next strip does the same job on engineering. Finally, below all this, there’s a text in slightly bigger font which says: We celebrate Shaastra. 🙂 Well this was just a designer’s way of saying that Shaastra is all bout intelligence, science and engineering.

3. Work Assignment and Execution

I should tell you that all this brainstorming session happens only with copywriters who constitute 50% of the design team. Once the team knew what exactly had to be done, it was time for me to assign works. The photographer was asked to team up with the copywriter who proposed the idea#1 and get the required picture shot. This was done in the afternoon itself. So by the time we met again yesterday in my room, some snaps had already been clicked. Here’s a sample.

Yes, so yesterday I called up a graphic artist and asked him to pick one of the two ideas for himself to work upon. He found the newspaper funda more challenging. I showed him the pics that were taken the other day. The two of us soon figured out that it would be good to have a pic in daylight and better if the newspaper was held a little properly with some actual newspaper header showing up. I asked the photographer to carry on another photo session and made sure that this time, she was accompanied by the Graphic Artist himself. Finally the job was done yesterday and I am sure work has begun on replacing the newspaper content with what I discussed.

For the execution of the second poster, the team realized that we needed the help of an artist to sketch the relevant pictures. Immediately the copywriter whose idea it was, was asked to go contact the artist (I have two artists in my team and that of course doesn’t include me :P).

This was the way the work was finally assigned yesterday.

By the way, we came up with yet another idea as this assignment of work was going on. Let me write about that in some other post at a later point of time. Another graphic artist was asked to work on the third idea which popped up just like that. It has been decided that we make three posters now (all of them should be over this week). And then pick the two which look best finally.

A few more posts on this series shall follow as and when the work progresses. And as you would have already guessed, this series will end when the final posters are ready for print.

Update: Follow Part 2 here

Part 3 here