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Minimalist Travel Poster: Paris Sizzles

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| October 10, 2011

Jim Groom added the Minimalist Travel Poster assignment to the ds106 assignment bank sometime in early 2011. The instructions are to simply create a minimalistic travel poster for a location in a film or TV series. The assignment was inspired by the amazing Star Wars based posters created by Rob Frappler at Screen Rant.

Looking at Liddell’s, Eric’s and  D’arcy’s impressive submissions, I began to have doubts as to whether or not I correctly understood the assignment in coming up with this poster for Paris, Texas. Perhaps I shouldn’t have used an image from the film for the poster. But this is one of the intriguing things about the ds106 process – we are free to interpret the assignments as we wish (or so I was led to believe).

As for the process here, it was not so tricky. A Google image search delivered the still from the film (it would have been better to have grabbed the image from a DVD but the library was closed so I couldn’t get the DVD). A line of advertising copy came to me almost immediately after choosing and downloading the image. I was thinking of a line in a Cole Porter song: I love Paris when it sizzles.

As I’m relatively inexperienced with photoshop and have already forgotten some details in making this poster, it will helpful for me to list the steps in list form (later I can come back to extend or revise the list).

  • open the image with Photoshop
  • duplicate the layer and make the top layer invisible
  • adjust exposure, hue/saturation and color levels randomly until the desired look emerges (it really is hit and miss with – I just keep moving the sliders until I see something I like)
  • make the top layer visible so it looks like the original photo again
  • use the pen tool create a path around the red had (this seemed like something I wanted to stand out from the rest of the image)
  • convert the path to a selection
  • invert the selection and press delete (this removes all of the top layer except for the selected area around the had
  • adjust saturation ann hue values randomly to make the hat extra red
Those are the basic steps for creating the image above. As mentioned before I wanted to use the line “I love Paris, Texas when it sizzles” as the copy for the poster. But when trying to lay the text over the image, it soon became apparent that this would be difficult. I’m still new to working with text in image editors like Photoshop so this was a useful learning experience. I quickly developed a sense of what I can’t do.
I wanted the text to be distinct and jump out from the image. Instead it looks both flat and jagged around the edges. I realize that it is probably more effective to have text against a solid background. I’m going to look at text on graphic images more closely in the future and try figure out how to make it look better.
If anyone wishes to share some painters for working with text in Photoshop or any other suggestions related to this paper, I’m all ears.

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