I won the commencement poster contest for this year’s graduating class, and I’ve just been finishing it up the last few days. The final file is 1.54 GB, and 67 layers – it got too big for my computer to handle, so I had to go to the media lab to work on it. I’m glad I did, because I used Photoshop CS4 for the first time, and discoved it pretty much rules.
I wanted it to be celebratory, and representative and unique to this year’s graduating class. I hand wrote as many Division III titles as I could collect in the background. The guy jumping is a first-year friend of mine, Devon, who’s a ridiculous tricker/acrobat. All of the text is hand lettered – a lot of work, but I’m so happy with how it came out!
Also recently I designed a t-shirt for Admissions, that they’re going to send to accepted students. I’m really psyched about how the 2010 roots turned out.
I seem to be slowly rebranding Hampshire with my personal hand lettering style… I think I’m also going to submit a signer sweatshirt design in this style as well. With these projects and several others I’ve done recently, I’ve become far more confident in hand lettering, and doing things by hand in general. My process for these was to do a few quick pencil sketches of the design, then do a layout on the computer for more precise placement of text, do refined drawings of the design, then scan them back into the computer, clean up the drawings, and composite everything together. I like this FAR better than designing 100% on the computer, as I used to! (Even though it’s more work…)
Speaking of doing things by hand, I’ve got some very exciting projects in the works for the rest of my Division III, and I’m going to be spending a lot of time in Lemelson, plasma cutting, blacksmithing, and welding…
