Quark XPress Poster

When we first got assigned this project I was slightly concerned.  I was nervous to use Quark, I thought, why can't I just use Photoshop?  Now, after using Quark, I am very into it!

I was excited to make a poster for my favorite band.  It's a very fun project.  I also like that the last 3 projects were all connected.  I really enjoyed making the powerpoint and what my final project turned out to be so I wanted to translate the feeling of my powerpoint into a poster.

To begin, I knew I wanted to make use of borders somewhere on the poster.  I also knew that I liked the color combination of a black background and a bright colored font.  I chose yellow, like the one I had used in my powerpoint.  For graphics, I simply did a google search to find the main photograph that would be the highlight of the poster.  Then, knowing I wanted to use a border I decided to outline the large picture with some of the bands album covers, again drawing back to my powerpoint.  Since I had already made each album cover in photoshop for the powerpoint I simply used the same graphics for both.

Making a border did not seem like a difficult task when I was planning, but it turned out to be the most challenging part of the poster.  Each piece used in Quark must be separated into containers.  Therefore, each picture that appears in the border is a separately made box.  Once the boxes were made, I imported the graphics and re-sized each one so they would fit into the container.  Looking at the poster in Quark it seemed that each box was aligned and sized properly.  When I printed the poster everything looked sloppy.  In order to solve this, I was shown how to zoom in on the screen.  I went and re-worked each box so the border was perfect.  The border was very tedious, but worth the result.

Once the main part of the poster was done I filled in the time, location, cost, free giveaway, and date.  I used yellow for the name of the band at the top and the all the details, except for the free giveaway.  I chose to put the free giveaway in a different color because I wanted to highlight the FREE part!  I put it in red, a prominent color that appears in the border.  I felt that it tied the font together with the graphics.

I am very proud of this project!  I feel like after each project I think it's my favorite, but this has definitely been a highlight from the class thus far!

The only thing I wish that I could have changed was the size of the information at the bottom.  I made the font size as large as I could without making it look crowded, but it does not stand out as much as I wish it did.  I am very happy I chose the yellow color, since my font is not too large.

This project has made me excited to do other projects in Quark XPress.