Evolution of the Civil War Lan Poster

This was my first post over at the new EMU Marketing Blog for the office where I work.

One of the project I recently finished up was the poster for the Civil War Lan. This poster had originally been designed as a spin-off of the emu lan 3.0 poster. However the design ended up not working out so well. Lee asked me to look into doing a kind of “capture the flag” themed poster.

Someone had been looking into the capture the flag theme to and found an awesome Unreal Tournament fansite kit with some nice hi-res character photos. After several hours of painting some grungy watercolor flag and slapping the character and some text over it I came up with this.

1st Draft

2nd Draft

At this point the general design was working out well and the flags were looking betting the more I added to them but the whole poster felt stale with the grungy battle scared flags and then the clean computer render and text so I began looking up some ways to add to the design.

3rd Draft Smoke Added

4th Draft Smoke and Bars Added

At this point the rest of the office started to chime in on the poster. Everyone liked where it was going until made the point that the character was a copyrighted image and this would be going out to Corvallis for the OSU part of the event so the character had to be scraped. The poles also needed more grunge as Paul also pointed out to match the same battle scarred appearance of the flags.

5th Draft No Character

With out the character to anchor the whole design it started to unravel a bit as I messed around with the proportions and text placement.

6th Draft Different Text Placement

The text placement in this version is close to where it ends up in the final poster. But the proportion and size of the flags still isn’t working out.

7th Draft Smoke Flags Changed

8th Draft Flags and Text Different

This draft also includes the flags attaching to the poles differently (as you can see in the drawings at the top) and moving Civil War Lan back to the bottom to try and anchor the flags.

9th Draft Bars Reappear Some stuff is removed to redo

Trying to add some weight to the poster mean I bring back the black bars from the start. I’m also reworking how the flags attach to the poles after overdoing it the first time around.

But the design still isn’t working so Lee asks me to look at stock robots we could use. What I come up with enthuses no one.

10th Draft Version A Stock Character

10th Draft Version B

Neither of these robots work at this point Paul wanted this to work as much as I do and offers to do a character illustration for me to drop in.

11th Draft Pauls Character

This looks promising but the coloring doesn’t work out on the character and then Lee comes to the rescue with the computer graveyard idea that ends up on the final poster. An hour or so of searching IStock gives me the this mock-up.

12th Draft Stock Photomockup

This gives me a good feeling and Lee agrees so net is the first mockup with the stock photos edited and placed.

13th Draft Hi-Res Stock Added

This is what the final poster ended up being. I just went in and added the smoke back in.

14th Draft Final Image

And there it is in all its glory. Notice the misspelling of “Oregon State University” which someone catches right before we go to press and which remained misspelled throughout 14 drafts and almost 30 print outs.

The final file wieghs in at several hundered megabytes over 50 layers and half a dozen smart objects each containing an additional 10 layers. The 32×57.5 version that will be outside the Fish Bowl soon weights in at almost a gig.