Week 4.1: Cooper River Bridge Run

This is the poster I did for the Cooper River Bridge Run in 2009. When I did the poster, obviously I had to have the bridge in it. So I modified it just a bit by rounding some of the edges and getting rid of the strings. I mostly got rid of the strings because you couldn't see them with everything in front of them. When I finished modifying the bridge it was still too big to put the entire bridge in the poster so I cut about half of it off and just put one of the towers in the poster. Then, since it is South Carolina I figured I would put a palm tree in it. So I found a good picture of a palm tree and traced it in illustrator. Then cut out parts I didn't need and simplified it as much as I could, but still tried to keep it looking like a palm tree. Then, I chose my colors for the poster. I picked red, orange and blue. I made the background a gradient of orange and light orange that almost looks yellow so that it looks like a sun in the sky. I made the tree orange and the bridge red. Then, I had to figure out a way to put the type in it some how. For the contest it was required to put the words "32nd Annual Cooper River Bridge Run 10K April 4th 2009 Charleston, SC." So I decided to put a box on top of the background and made it transparent enough to still see the background but still enough to put type on top of it and be able to read it. Took me a while to get it just where i wanted it. Next I had to figure out where I wanted to place the type. By this time I had already decided to make the type the focus of the poster. Meaning the type is what i wanted you to see first then get closer to read it and notice the bridge in the back. I finally just started putting things on the screen after i picked the typeface. I put everything in order and made the words that were more important bigger such as the date. The poster still looked a bit flat though so I thought about it for a while and figured it out. The type needs to pop and then the rest will pop with it. So I double the type to make it look the words had a slight red outline with brought em off the poster just a bit. I didn't want to put a drop shadow on them because then it would pop too much. But, I wanted to make the poster look a bit fun and I think I accomplished that much.