Here’s the rundown of how I made my January flier.

Right off the bat I’ll show you the finished poster.

As you can see, it’s a pretty scattered design with a lot of elements. It wasn’t hard to get all the parts and put them on the page.  The difficulty came with determining the best way to balance everything.

The whole design started when I made the perfect trace of a comedy mask. I’ve been trying to avoid traditional comedy imagery as a major part of my designs, since I think that comedy advertising relies too much on jesters, comedy masks, laughing, and things that don’t really portray an attitude. They just try to say “this show is so funny I’m serious guys check out this jester.”

But this trace came out so good that I immediately started trying to use it with a poster. I’ve been compiling imagery over the year so I wanted to dip into that storehouse.

Here’s the frame. All the quote balloons provide a pretty decent grid to start with.

Here’s the mask, the arrow, the hand in the upper left, the hand with the hat, and the heart. The hand with the graph on it is a palm reading diagram that I can’t seem to locate again. The eye is just a piece of clipart you can find pretty easily online (translation: I forgot to include it in this image and I’m too lazy to do it now). All of these are just items I’ve ever scanned in the past or clipart I’ve found online. I traced all of them and incorporated them into my design.

Right off, the design beats up your eyes and holds them hostage. The style is somewhat there, but the ability for you to understand what’s going on is pretty much zero. After a bit of shuffling and editing, I came to the next draft.

Now things are starting to come into place. I haven’t yet given up on the static balloon, but there’s more of a direction for your eye to follow. The hand in the upper left starts a sort of slinky action that moves it down the page. Still doesn’t seem to be quite right.

I remember I need to add a url on the poster, and shove it in on the bottom. This is when I give up on writing people’s names on the posters to save room and people’s attention. I add white to all of the balloons, thinking this balance it out. It doesn’t work, but it now the problem comes right up to my face: the white of the quote balloons is dominating the whole thing. You’ll also see that I change the direction of some items to accomodate the change in text and my attempt to guide the eye.

There we go. Dumping the white from non-important balloons solves the eyesplosion problem. I also kick up the text of the show to make it the most important part. And there we go. Now all I have to do is smash it all with a hammer and make the smaller version for my blog:

So ends another adventure in comedy poster design.