My Poster!

My poster is an advertisement for rapper Kanye West’s 2007 album Graduation. Taking inspiration from West’s actual marketing campaign and design scheme for the album, my poster features certain trademarks of the Graduation era, including the teddy bear mascot and the “shutter shades” sunglasses. Additionally, a similar colour scheme to the actual album was used in the poster, to create proximity between the two images. The bright colours, youthful font, and familiar mascot all serve to effectively meet the target audience in a unique manner.

In order to incorporate the elements mentioned above, I took photos of a teddy bear in my house and a pair of shutter shades I purchased around the release of the album. Once I had the photos in Photoshop, I removed the backgrounds of each image. I used the magic wand tool to select the entire teddy bear and paint over it to make it look like a cartoon, a technique I repeated on the glasses. To create the new background, I used the rectangle tool to create a rectangle that covered the entire canvas, and used a gradient to go from purple to yellow. I wanted to use purple because the actual Graduation album is primarily purple, and I chose yellow as a second colour because it complements purple on the colour wheel. I used a gradient overlay to make the two colours fade into each other. In terms of the text, I chose a modern font that was close to the one used on Graduation’s cover, but still distinct. Additionally, I capitalized only the “Y” and “W” in “Kanye West,” just as on the album. By duplicating the text several times, lowering it and reducing the opacity by 10% each time, I was able to make it appear as though West’s name flew up to the place it is in. A similar effect was used on “The New Album” and “In Stores September 11^th,” but instead the duplication occurred on both sides of the text. These two phrases additionally were lined up with one another, a technique learned in lecture called alignment.