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During today's class:

• You'll be introduced to this assignment
• We'll also do a short tutorial on Live Trace and Live Paint.
• We'll take a walk through the Effects and Appearances functions in Illustrator.
• I'll also show you how to bring artwork from Illustrator to InDesign.

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Da Vinci Poster

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Assignment

Your assignment is to design a poster to promote an artist. The artist in question is Leonardo da Vinci, designer. You must link Leo's mind-blowing genius and style with a twentieth century bleeding-edge design aesthetic.

Leo was much more than a painter. He was an engineer, a scientist, a sculptor, an astronomer and more. You need to choose a very specific object that he worked on and sell him as the provider of that object.

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As an example, DaVinci designed a rudimentary helecopter. You could promote him as a modern-day Burt Rutan. In this case, you could be promoting his design of the helicopter and moreover, you could sell tickets for the first vertical lift flight in the world.

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Assumptions

• Leo is an avant-garde designer.
• He lives in the 21st century.
• He creates breakthrough designs of never-before-seen objects.
• His style is very cutting-edge.

The main purpose of this poster is to promote Leo's design services, so you need to really ratchet up the style. See the samples on the left of this page. Just because he's a designer, doesn't mean that you can only use his sketches and paintings. It would actually be really interesting to promote his design savvy by borrowing from his engineering work. Imagine a poster with his imagined helicopter as a central graphical device.

In case you're wondering why Leo doesn't design his own poster, he's busy! Also, it is very challenging for a designer to design his own promotional art. Often, other designers have a better handle on your style than you do.

Since this is a promotional poster, it will need to contain some promotional text. You'll need to write this. Keep it short. Imagine someone walking by your poster in the halls of the college. They don't have time to read too much. Make it punchy. Avoid bullet lists. If you want to see really well written promotional text, just sidle on over to Apple's site. It's chalk full of zingy copy as an example.

Make sure you include all the usual contact info which would be on such a poster. There needs to be a way for the passer-by to contact Leo.

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Sources

For this project, the focus will be on Live Trace and Live Paint. You can acquire imagery from anywhere. I suggest Google Images, Flickr, The Stock Exchange or any other source on the Web.

You can create your own art, if you wish. You can draw in Illustrator. You can scan photos—your own, or from any publication. Again, make sure the quality is good.

The copy (text) for your poster may be "influenced" by something you read online or elsewhere. All I insist on it that it is error-free and appropriate to the piece.

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Software Skills

• InDesign typesetting
• This assignment requires that you provide the grid upon which you based your design. To do so, show it to me in your InDesign file.
• Illustrator Live Trace & Live Paint
• Illustrator Live Effects
• Adobe Kuler for colour selection
• Moving artwork from Illustrator to InDesign

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Rubric

The goal of this assignment is to bring together all the skills you have learned to date -- not only in Computer Graphics, but across the board. This assignment includes layout, type and software skills. You will need to demonstrate proficiency in all of these. The subject of the poster is fairly open to interpretation.

That said, you will be graded based on:

Visual appeal:

Your poster must contain visual elements of Leo's 15th century accomplishments combined with today's cutting edge aesthetics. It's Renaissance meets Wired Magazine.

Integration of software skills:

Your layout will be executed in InDesign. The associated assets include vector art and typography.

So, your InDesign document will contain well executed typography. Skills learned in Typography class must be applied. Vector art will be created in Illustrator to be copied and pasted or placed in InDesign. Yes, you must include vector art from Illustrator. Your files must be delivered in an organized fashion. I want to see all the files relating to this project. Make sure you work in an organized way.