A quickie hand-lettered flyer

A couple of weeks ago, I designed a flyer for a clothing swap I am hosting through Yogawood. I was proud of myself for completing the entire thing from start to finish in less than 90 minutes in between the end of work and the start of the House Industries lecture. Then, I went to the House Industries lecture, saw their hand lettering, and was immediately humbled. This is a good thing, because seeing amazing work makes me strive to be better on my own projects.

I'm going to share my process, because it's a good abridged version of how I would work on a bigger job.

1) START WITH A SKETCH:

Before I do any computer work, I always start with sketches, to work out any inner demons and organize my brain. These pre-sketches are ROUGH, and normally would never seen by anyone but myself. 

2) REFINE:

I have a general idea of how I want the title to look, but it needs to be worked out a bit, so I worked on some slightly different comps. I would usually do 4-6 pages of different ideas over the course of a few days, but again, this is a quick job so I focused on 1 concept.

3) ENLARGE & REFINE:

Okay, I've found a design that I like, but it's a teeny tiny 1 inch drawing, and I need it to fit on a 8.5 x 11 inch flyer, so I scan it into the computer, enlarge it, then print it out the size that I want. Except it's a grainy mess, so I need to work on it again. I would usually use tracing paper for this part, except I was at work, and had none. So in a pinch, I used the window as a giant light table, and it worked really well! I'm used black micron pens of various point size to trace over the drawing.

4) COMPUTER CLEAN-UP:

While my sketch is way better than it was, it's still a little messy, at this point I scan it back into the computer and fix any sloppy line work.

 

5) COLOR: 

I don't even started to think about color until I have the logo design down. You don't want to confuse yourself. At this point I have generally have an idea of some colors that I think would work well, but I'm open to suggestions. So I head over to colour lovers and do a palette search using a color or theme I'd like to see. I forget the exact term I used, but here are some potential palettes I liked.

I color all my projects digitally, and for logos I would normally vectorize & use Illustrator, but this is a fast job, so I keep it bitmap & colored in Photoshop .

6) TEXT LAYOUT:

I do this part using Photoshop, or inDesign, depending on the project. I use the guideline and paragraph alignment tools to make sure everything is laid out in a professional way.

Done, yeah!

SHAMELESS PLUG: If you are a woman & live nearby, please come to the swap on May 6th! Clothing Swaps are so much fun, and I promise you will leave with some awesome new finds. Also, it's FREE, just bring a canned food donation for the Food Bank of South Jersey.You can sign up on facebook here or on the yogawood special events page here so we have a general idea of how many people to expect!