For this Graphic Design project, I decided to make a poster based on my trip to Perth in Australia. The reason I pick this topic is that I have been to Australia many times with my family and I enjoyed my trip every time. Therefore, I wanted to include four photos in my poster including the background to represent different aspects of my journey.
For the process of designing my poster, first of all, I selected a photo as my background. However, I encountered some problems which is the picture was not big enough to fit in my poster. Therefore, I watched a YouTube video of how to resize an image without losing its quality. After getting the background done, I placed three photos onto the background and I wanted to add some styles to each layer. I selected one picture, picked the option ‘stroke’ and changed the color to white. Then I clicked ‘new style’ and then clicked on my other two photos, so that they could have the same boarders. Finishing the boarders, I selected my family photo and then used the rectangular tool to draw a label under the picture. I clicked on the text tool and wrote down “family gathering” and adjusted the size of the text. After this step, I went back to move tool and moved the text into my label box. I named the label and duplicated the group so that I could move the rectangular box to other pictures and change the texts. After completing all the photos and the tagging I’ve noticed some blank space on the right half. Therefore, I decided to insert a map of western Australia to fill in the space and make the poster look more colorful. Firstly, I added the map to the second bottom layer so it is beneath my photos by above the background. Then I lowered the opacity to eighty percent in order to let it blend in with the background. After that, I added a twenty-five percent light color blend so the ocean blue on the map fits more onto the sky back ground.
This assignment was a little hard but I went back to watch the tutorials from last week and it helped a lot. Overall, it was a great experience for me to get to practice how to use Photoshop. The visual elements were important to my design. Based on color theories, I used complementary colors with my background and the map so that the colors could contrast with each other. The photos also illustrate highlights of my trip to Perth and the labels give the audiences a clearer direction of what I did, the back ground shows the beautiful scenery of Perth. For the storytelling process, I believe that my photo clearly explained my amazing trip to Perth and showed its purpose with design.
Resources:
This is the link of how to resize an image that I used to resize my background.
http://www.maphill.com/australia/western-australia/maps/physical-map/
This is the website where I got the map photo from, and the map is included in my poster.
The Com210 Blog 
I think your project is amazing. It has the feel of a very well-made poster with a simple feel. I can also tell you put a lot of effort into this as well. The font, image placement, and background are good. But there are some aspects of your project that can be improved upon.
I think the two pictures on the top can be made a little bigger to fill up a little more of the background space, but not too much of it. Parts of the map of Australia could be cut off, especially the ocean in the upper left corner of the map as well as the top couple centimeters or so.
The way you framed your pictures to make it look like a Polaroid Camera photo is a good way to frame it and make it look natural at the same time. And the labels next to these photos also add a nice touch to it as well.
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Self Critique Comment: After reading through the feedback from the members in my group, I found the suggestions very helpful for me to improve my Graphic Design Project. There are three aspects I will be working on this week to make this project better. First of all, I will make more contrast between my pictures and the background to give the audiences a stronger visual view of what story I am telling and what is the center of my poster. Right now my background and the map picture are all very light color. I should change one of them to a darker color. I could do that by adjusting the brightness or saturation level of the layer or to change the effect to make a bigger contrast. Secondly, I will standardize my borders to all my three pictures so they will look the same and neat. Right now the border of my picture “Meeting Quokkas” is a little wider than the other two pictures. Therefore, I would adjust the borders and crop it more properly. Thirdly, I think my poster would look a lot better if I enlarge the two pictures on top of my poster to fill up a little more of the background space because my “Family gathering” picture is too small now and my family members in the picture could not be seen clearly, and also by enlarging the picture, the audiences could also get a clearer view of the quokka. In addition, I will cut off some part of the map such as the blue ocean in the top left corner because the colors do not match with each other and the edge is too sharp. What I will do is to cut couple centimeters off and enlarge the green map part. The potential challenges I will be facing is to insert the map and cut the edge. It took me a long time figuring out how to insert the map and now it will be even harder for me to crop the edge and then insert the map. In addition, I will be changing the style and layers in order to make contrast of colors and also add some effects. I am not very good at changing the brightness of pictures and making effects, so I will be looking back to the tutorials last week to check and learn. Overall, after these changes are made, I believe my poster will look even better!
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I absolutely loved your design! Your magazine cover looks ready to print it’s so polished. I really liked how you used what you learned from the Photoshop tutorials to make those captions for the photos. The only thing that really stood out to me was the picture labeled “Meeting Quokkas.” The border for this photo was slightly wider on the top and bottom in comparison to the other photos. Since you’re going for a Polaroid look, I’d suggest making the borders skinnier at the top and then wider at the bottom like Polaroids are. I’d do this for all three photos for consistency. My only other suggestion would be to maybe include fake page numbers next to your photo’s descriptions, since magazine’s typically have page numbers for their main stories. Also, under the main title, you could even put something like, “September 2016 Issue,” to make it seem even more like a magazine. All in all, this was a very well done draft and I can tell you put a lot of time and effort into it!
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