This was a project to make an informational poster about three natural wonders in the world, the northern lights, Grand Canyon, and the Great Barrier Reef. We were assigned one of three for our first poster and later we could make a poster set with all three of them.

I was first assigned the northern lights. The first part of the process was to research travel posters and informational posters. This projects had elements of both, so after researching them, my goal was to combine a travel poster with an informational poster. I made sketches of the layout that I wanted to do for my posters and tried several of them to see what they look like on screen.

 I wanted an image to cover a big part of the poster. I first tried photographies of the northern lights but they had too many values and it was hard to read black texts on the darker part and white texts on the brighter part of the image. So instead, I chose to go with a simpler vector art and it boosted the readability.

At first, I had all white texts since I used a dark image, but after the first critique I learned that for bigger blocks of texts that are printed, black text on a light background is easier to read. So I filtered the image with white blur and changed the text color to black for better readability. 

After my first poster was done, I used the same layout to create two almost identical posters for Grand Canyon and the Great Barrier Reef, paying attention to the color and contrast between the image and the text.

Through this project, I have learned that things are a lot different between screen and print. The biggest takeaway from this project was the rule of thumb not to use white text on light background for big posters if it's more than three lines of text. I have also learned other rules that usually applies to posters like 1 inch margins around the texts, and 75 character limit per line. I also became a lot more comfortable with Indesign than I used to be before this project.