Curtain Up! ... Part 2

To catch up, read Curtain Up!

I mentioned towards the end of that post having noticed some flaws with my designs. Minor, but I can be my worst client.

When dealing with a logo, you must try it in several ways. How does it look on letterhead, a brochure, business card, an ad?

While I was working on ACME's season brochure, I noticed the logos for several of the shows were too small for their canvas. We'll start with The Lion in Winter.

The left one is the original concept. When I took the logo for the brochure, I left it on the canvas of red. I centered it a bit, but when it's reduced, the logo itself ends up getting a little lost in the red. Let's try dropping the lion, and enlarging the title, as shown on the right.

I also dropped a lot of the information which was necessary because the dates and venue had to be moved down. Even though they're a little smaller, they stand out better as white on black. The rest of the information such as ticket prices and upcoming shows is important, but can be found on the website. Plus publishing ticket prices on the poster could have the unintended effect of weeding out the audience before they even get to the box office. (If they start to balk at the prices at the box office, you still have the opportunity to make the sale.)

However, I wanted my lion. It's very similar to the one on Henry II's crest, and it adds the appropriate medieval touch. I tried placing the full color lion in the first poster with the larger title in the second, but it looked horrible. Taking a lesson from the Mixed Couples poster, I played with the opacity of the lion. (I converted it to grayscale first.) Here is the final result with the first attempt:

What a difference!

I'm also working on tweaking Die! Mommie! Die! because I felt there wasn't enough blood. I realized I still had a partial bottle of India Ink from ... from ... I've no idea what it was for, but I had it. I spread out some newspapers and blank sheets of white paper paper on the ping-pong table and summoned my inner Jackson Pollock. A few nice slashes, and some menacing drops are a happy end result. Still a little wet though. I'll run them through the scanner, hit 'em with some red before placing them on the poster.

(Now I'm worrying about there being too much blood.)