Poster for school, need some opinions

Well i have to design a page ad for one of my classes. I need some input on this piece i am working on. Any comments are appreciated.

Well, it looks good but your spelled "nurture" wrong.

I was about to say that, but otherwise, its looks quite nice.

Looks pretty good. But you've used a run-on sentence employing a comma splice: There should be a period after "talent" and "from" should be "From."

Also, "the fine art" should be "the fine arts," unless the school teaches only one, in which case it should be named instead of being called "the fine art."

Edit: Digital Art has both words capitalized, but Traditional art doesn't. Make it Digital art, or you'll have to capitalize all of them to maintain consistency.

Ah thanks for catching them. I for some reason cannot see mistakes like that. Thanks. Here is a revised version, if you see any spelling mistakes and or any grammatical errors please tell me. Also any design critiques is really appreciated.

great use of color palette and i love the texture of the background. did you create the background? the brown splatter up top looks like its been cut off. you might of done that intentionally but the other splatter dosent do that so it looks like you just missed it. also something about the placement of the camera bugs me. the other photos kind of lead you in one direction except for the camera. everything else looks great

All this might be too esoteric, but. . . .

Maybe you could move "Art" to the right enough to allow "variety" on the same line as "wide." As it is, it breaks the phrase or single thought — it's what is known as a "split head" (headline). But moving "Art" may unbalance the look of it.

On second reading, you could delete "the" in "the fine arts," for the same reason that "the" isn't needed in front of "digital photography." And without the "the," you have wiggle room if someone says the school doesn't teach all of them; "the fine arts" means every single one of them, including Greek tragedies complete with masks. But that's really picky.

"Digital Art" remains inconsistent, but you may have good reason to leave it.

The letter spacing in "High School" is quite a bit looser than in "Grover Cleveland." It might be too obvious, and "High School" draws my eye before I read the top line, "Grover." But I know why you did it.

As it stands, I think you need to review the kerning (letter spacing) and line height of the text at the top.

I'm not sure if you done this on purpose, but the words 'Grover', 'Cleveland' and 'HighSchool' are all running into each other, i.e. if you drew a line under each word, the lines would intersect.

The 'l' of 'land' actually goes through the letter directly above it...which really doesn't look too hot, nor is it good for legibility.

Again, look at your kerning, the kerning of 'HighSchool' is much wider than the other two words. This generally isn't good.

A lot of what I have said also applies to the next paragraph (black writing). The bottom line here seems to be running slightly off, taking the word 'ART' as a reference.

If you look at the start of each line in this paragraph also, the words 'Grover', 'Variety' and 'From' should all be starting at the same point, but the word 'variety' is indented slightly.

These lines should also be in line with the lines in the top paragraph.

Everything on a page should generally relate to everything else in some way. Although sometimes you can break the rules, I think in this case they would look better adhered to.

Scrolling down the page, I can quickly see that the 'an award winning yearbook' piece of text, is not really aligned in any way with the box it is underneath. It also runs off level with the bottom of the box.

Lots to think about here...hope my experience has helped you a little.

I was going to mention the kerning as well. Besides the kerning, I'm not sure if you did this on purpose or not, but the angles of Grover, Cleveland, and High School all seem to be a bit different - this visually bothers me, along with the "l" that runs into the "e". If you're building this in Illustrator you can convert the text to outlines and adjust the "l" by itself to prevent it from coming up in the middle of the "e". Also, if you type out the headline and adjust it the way you want it to overlap and make the angle your last step to that piece of text you will be sure to keep it all the same.

One more thing I might suggest is to have the large word ART be the same colors as the sub-headers. This might tie everything in a little better. Otherwise, I like your background and the randomness of the piece. Keep working at it!

Again, the leading, tracking and kerning need to be addressed.
Also, the "Digital Art/Traditional art" was not changed, as was previously suggested. You also use the term "fine arts" in the headline, yet use "traditional" on the poster body. I would stick to one or the other, leaning towards "Fine Art".
Same goes for "Film/Video production", etc. You should simply capitalize everything to keep consistency.

Tighten up your grid structure so your overall alignment matches up.

It could just be the resolution of the image saved, but the black text in the headline appears to have a stroke on it. At the least it looks very jagged. I would say it was just the resolution, but the photos seem fine and the text is a little off-looking.

Instead of using Photoshop, try using Illustrator if you have access to it.

So I know this really doesn't have to do with graphics, etc. of the poster--but in one of my college Marketing classes our Professor always said a poster was no good with out some sort of contact information (name, phone #, email, etc) Not sure if that will affect your poster, but thought I'd throw it in there for consideration.

Keep up the good work <><

Redo typography.

youthpastor said:

So I know this really doesn't have to do with graphics, etc. of the poster--but in one of my college Marketing classes our Professor always said a poster was no good with out some sort of contact information (name, phone #, email, etc) Not sure if that will affect your poster, but thought I'd throw it in there for consideration.

Keep up the good work <><

Click to expand...

Well actually this is going to be included in a book that we are going to submit for th accreditation for our school, so in fact contact information is not needed.

Are you trying to emphasize Grover Cleveland High School or the art program? When I look at it, the type tells me the most important thing on this poster is the name of the high school, but my conscience tells me different.

I definitely think you need to redo the type completely, but that is easy to fix. The main problem is you don't have a hierarchy. What is the most important thing on this poster? Probably something to do with art. So why is it in a color that almost blends in with the background?

I think you can make the high school name smaller and you could probably put the black type somewhere else on the poster. Essentially you have all of the information somebody needs at the top left of the poster, they have no real incentive to look at the pictures. If you move those sentences to the bottom or even in between some of the pictures it forces the people to look through the entire ad, not just the top left.

It is a good start, and with some work it can get a lot better.