NMC Magazine Call for Submissions Poster

For this poster design, I wanted to showcase the rough and messy aspects of an artist's process to relate to this semester’s magazine theme: The Maker's Process. I hoped this poster would inspire other artists and creators across all fields to share their processes with everyone in this issue.

I always start my process by sketching quick thumbnails and browsing Pinterest for inspiration. This always helps me to figure out what direction I want to take with my design. In almost every thumbnail, you can see that I wanted an unfinished look to the poster. I began sketching some rough figures in Procreate for the main image in the poster design. I chose the sketch of the girl with yellow sketch lines because the pose was much more interesting and dynamic. The yellow and grayscale color scheme reminds me of graphite sketches and sticky notes, things I often use in my art process. The next step was to take my figure sketch and thumbnails and start playing around with different variations in Adobe Illustrator. I hunted for different fonts and textured brushes to create a final version I was content with.
Throughout the whole process, I was sharing my different ideas and variations with other members of the NMC Magazine team to get helpful feedback and critiques. This is an essential part of the process, especially when the poster was going to represent all of us. Another important part of the process was test printing. Designs always look different on the screen than they do printed. I checked for readability, typos, and how the colors appeared, then I went back and made changes to the file, and then repeated this until we had a poster that looked polished, accessible, eye-catching, and most importantly, readable.