Calvin's Train of Thought

Young Life Posters - June 6, 2016

Ice Heist Poster When I was a Young Life Leader in Saskatoon, one of my regular tasks was to create the posters for our Young Life Clubs (a Friday night event for the community kids). I think the first few posters used material from the Wikimedia Commons, edited together in GIMP. The trouble with this method of creating posters was that it was extremely time consuming to find what I was looking for (and I seldom found anything matching “what I was looking for”), so I quickly moved into creating custom graphics for our posters.

The initial program I used was OpenOffice Draw. I had done custom graphics in this program before, and I was comfortable with the interface. The quality started off reasonable and I did improve as time went on. But one of the drawbacks to this method was that my “curved lines” were little more than lots of straight lines, which ultimately limited the quality of the graphics that I could create.

Cookie Catastrophy Poster The poster I did for “Cookie Catastrophe” was probably one of the best (and one of the last) ones I did using OpenOffice Draw. At that point, I recognized the limitations of the program I was using and began looking into other software with which to properly create vector graphics. That was when I found InkScape. While InkScape’s interface may be a bit more daunting than that of OpenOffice, and while it relies more heavily on keyboard shortcuts, it proved to be an excellent replacement for OpenOffice Draw.

With the use of InkScape, the quality of my work improved, some of the best being the two monkey t-shirt designs I created. Following is a sampling of the work I did. For the movie Mixup Poster, I removed the original Jurassic Park Style font as I have recently become aware that there is a trend among certain (many?) free font websites to pirate commercial fonts – and as I do not know which free font website I got the font from and thus cannot speak to its legitimacy, I have chosen not to use it in my portfolio site. The same deal holds true for the Time Traveling posters which originally read “Forward to the Past” in a Back to the Future Styled font – I have simply removed the title from this one for the time being. Finally, I have redacted specific information such as locations and contact names/phone numbers as I don’t need to be distributing those to the internet at large.

Ice Heist Poster

Movie Mixup Poster

Project Potato Poster

Monkeys T-Shirt

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