Creating My Poster

After looking at other posters that advertise other newspapers, this has made me realise that I need to think of a slogan/statement for the news paper. All of the newspaper posters have a slogan that is catchy and each of these slogans and statements are completely individual from each other, so I need to think of something completely unique that matches up with the name of the paper and sounds like it is suited to be a newspaper slogan.
Here are some of the ideas that I have come up with for the slogan/statement for my newspaper poster:
- "It's the Heart of Essex"
- It's a part of your Heart
- Be a part of our Heart
- Be a part, of the Essex Heart
- Discover the Heart of Essex
- Keeping Essex alive
- Our Heart is your heart


After attempting to fill a page with the name of the paper and it's slogan. I realised I'm definately going to need a photograph.
Here are some of the ideas that I have come up with for the photographs:
1. I could create a large red heart out of card/paper and have various different people holding this i.e. all different ages, sizes and class's etc.
2. I could take individual photographs of different people (like above) but in their comfort zones.
(for the two ideas above, I would use the slogan 'Our Heart is your heart')


Below are the photographs that I have taken for my poster. I have decided to do idea 1, of having people hold a heart, but instead of 9 photographs, I will take 4 and arrange them into the same shape in the centre of the poster.
The first two photographs below are of friends at sixthform. I felt that I would need to convey a wide target audience, so I would use a wider variation of ages rather than anything else. Out of the first two, I will be using the second photograph because they look a lot more comfortable in the photograph.

The photograph above is of my parents, I felt that if I were to use more couples rather than groups of people then it would emphasize the use of the heart and the name of the paper.
I decided to take another photograph of a couple, but of a different age. Out of the two below, I will be using the first photograph as the flash created a brighter photograph and it's more clear.
Below, I have taken a photograph of my grandparents. I felt that it would broaden the target audience of my newspaper and this would be conveyed on the poster.

Stage 1 - Cutting the images out
Below, I am cutting around the people in the photograph, this is so that all of the images can be put together onto my poster. I have done this on GIMP using the paintbrush tool.


Once I had drawn around the people in each of my photographs, I had to get rid of the background. I did this using the Bucket Fill tool, shown below.


After clearing the background, this is how my photographs turned out.
Stage 2 - Putting the poster together
I chose to create my poster on an A4 template, this would mean that it could become an advert in a magazine for example.

Once I added each photograph, I had to scale them down because they were far too big and took up too much space each.


After experimenting with possible lay outs for my poster, I decided that having them in a box, 2x2 looks far too plain and simple. So I have decided to rotate them 2 x 2 at 17 degrees.
After putting the photographs together, I added the text. (shown on the two printscreens below)

I decided that if I were to stick to mainly black and red in the poster, then it would stick with the theme I have chosen for my newspaper and it's website. I also chose to keep 'heart' in the same font as the masthead because it links it all together.
This was my final poster. Until I realised that it doesn't actually look complete. I felt that the background of the poster was far too white, so I added some red to the poster, which resulted in my final poster, shown in the Finalised Poster post.