My "Adopt A Dog Campaign" poster as it would be seen posted up in a Vancouver bus shelter.
The premise for this project was to use adobe illustrator to create a logo and a poster “to communicate an issue local to Vancouver that you feel strongly about.” Our audience for the poster was our peers and the goal was to create a poster that would “inspire them to take positive action for change.”
Taking influences from the vintage posters I posted earlier I tried to recreate the tone and feeling I get from vintage posters. The poster had to be made up of vector images so I could not recreate that classical hand drawn feel so instead I focused on trying to create a bold design with striking colours.
The issue I chose to communicate was the need to adopt dogs from the local SPCA shelters in BC and Vancouver which are always overcrowded with hundreds of dogs in need of good homes.
Though the project was initially frustrating because I was totally unfamiliar with how to use abobe illustrator, once I figured out the basics of the program, things smoothed out and I actually started to really enjoyed experimenting with the “live trace” tool and coming up with the final poster concept.
Below are four images I “traced” and manipulated in illustrator to create vector images that I incorporated into the logo and poster.
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Above are the two original logo concepts I came up with. The paw thumbs up was a “Approved by Animals Everywhere” logo and the AADC logo was for a mock “Adopt A Dog Campaign” that I made up for the purposes of this assignment.
Below is the original poster concept that I cam up with. Honestly is rather embarrassing posting it here because it’s soooooo bad. I don’t know what I was thinking when I came up with this original concept. I was trying to create a bold slogan but only ended up leaving a rather confusing message for the viewer that offered little to no information and did nothing to inspire the viewer.
Crappy original poster concept.
After getting several suggestions and critiques from my instructor and peers I reworked the “Approved By Animals Everywhere” to be more refined and completely redid the poster layout drawing more upon the vintage poster designs for inspiration. I was pretty satisfied with the AADC logo and only changed the colours on the paw to make it stand out more from the letters.
Removing the cat I enlarged the dogs to make them the main focus of the poster and added more detail to the bottom bull dog that didn’t take to the “live trace” very well. I also enlarged the vertical lines and rotated them to align with the angle the dogs are jumping at to create a feeling of motion that carries the eye through the poster and makes the leaping dogs more dynamic. I then went about about adding more informative text that helps explain the issue more clearly to the viewer and provide them with inspiration and means to take action by providing the website.
Below we have the redesigned thumbs up paw logo and the final poster design. Overall I spent approximately 13 -15 hours on this project.
Much, much better than the original yes?
I find this logo design much more effective than the original. The colours match the posters palette and tie it in nicely while also helping to better define the image of a paw giving you the thumbs up.
