3 1/2 stars

So basically, I am a giant nerd and obsessed with all things Harry Potter. I chose to complete the minimalist tv/movie poster assignment, where we were tasked with creating a poster for our favorite story using minimal designs or icons.

I actually own a minimalist Harry Potter poster that focuses on the first book, and I always thought it would be cool to have on for the last one, which was the main reason I chose this assignment. I like the idea of having the beginning and the end hanging on my wall next to me.

Creating this poster was incredibly easy in Photoshop. I used a plain white background and applied a water stain brush that I’ve had forever. To get the ink stained effect I wanted, I set my color to black but turned the opacity down to 40 percent.

To make the Deathly Hallows sign, I literally just drew a triangle, line, and circle and placed them all together. I slapped on words, played with the kerning a little and ta da! It was done. I think it looks really good, and part of me is considering making a similar poster for each of the books and just wall papering my room in my obsession.

What I have done with this poster is taken all 7 of the Harry Potter movies and combined them into one poster:

Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone (2001)

Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (2002)

Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (2004)

Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (2005)

Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (2007)

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (2009)

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 1 (2010)

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part2 (2011.)

The common theme throughout the movies is Harry vs. Voldemort and who will live to the end. When deciding what to do for this poster I knew I wanted to make it look like Harry vs. Voldemort to give way to the theme of the movies, of the two always battling it out. My hope for the poster is that the viewer gets a clear representation of what will be going on during a Harry Potter movie, and  to introduce the main character Harry, and “bad character” Voldemort.

Worth 3.5 Stars .

For my third design assignment this week, I did “Minimalist TV/Movie Poster” (3.5 stars). I chose this because I figured it would be easy to do for The Wire, it’s about drugs.

How I did it:

So I went on The Noun Project and searched “drugs” and came up with Drugs by Ed Harrison which I thought looked good. Then I toyed with the idea of putting the Baltimore skyline in the background but that would defeat the whole minimalist thing. So I went with red because red was a big theme in the first season. All I had to do was resize the drugs picture to fit the red. Then I went on dafont.com and downloaded a font called Delius and had to restart GIMP so the font would show up. Then I added the words and resized them until they looked good to me. Then I exported it. Unfortunately I forgot that I needed to make it specific to these three episodes so I put it up on Flickr and Twitter and the Hub via Known. Then I realized that I didn’t make it from these three episodes. So I changed the tagline to what Sobotka said in Episode 11, “I need to get clean.”

Here is the finished product:

For my next design assignment, I made a minimalist poster.

I decided to create a poster for one of my favorite Disney movies, Snow White.  This is a story of a young girl who had to escape her home because an evil queen wanted to kill her.  She ran into the forest and stumbled upon a small cottage that housed seven dwarves, whom she befriended rather quickly.  When learning that Snow White was still alive, the evil queen disguised herself into an old woman and tricked Snow White into eating a poisonous apple.  The apple put Snow White into a deep sleep and she was rescued by true love’s first kiss.

To do this, I used the program GIMP for the first time, and I may or may not have cried during the long, tedious process.  I first found my background by simply googling “deep purple background”.  After I saved this, I uploaded it to GIMP.

Using the Noun Project, I found images of a hand an apple.  I then uploaded the picture of the apple to GIMP.

In order to get the apple by itself, I used the lasso tool and carefully traced the picture of the apple.  After copying it to the clipboard, I pasted it onto the purple background then used the scale and move tools to get it the size I wanted and in the spot I wanted it in.

Then I did the same thing with the hand picture.
 

After I got this whole process straightened out, I uploaded this image to Picmonkey so that I could add text.  I didn’t add text on GIMP because I couldn’t figure out how to change the default font, and I was already tired of using GIMP at this point.

Once I got the image uploaded to Picmonkey, I clicked on the text icon and simply added my text and changed the font.

This was my second try at the poster.  I previously created another image for the same movie, but it didn’t look minimal enough.  Maybe i’ll let you be the judge.  Here they are side by side: