Here's the frontside of a promo card we're doing in our program. We'll be sending a box full of these out to various ad agencies and design boutiques in Southwestern Ontario to get some folks' attention. It helps promote Fanshawe College's graphic design program, and it gives us a chance of getting noticed. I decided to focus on typography as the main element for this project. First I designed the textured background in Corel Painter IX.5. I used mainly water color and just painted a slightly grungy background using wet sponges and a few splatters here and there. I assembled all the typographical elements in Adobe InDesign CS3 (I feel it's easier to work with type layout in this program). I exported the background from Painter and opened it in Photoshop CS3 and brought in the typographical elements and laid them out accordingly. Once I got everything into place, I used multiple brushes (Photoshop's own) to add scratches and other techniques to try and roughen up the design. And to finish the whole piece off, I really wanted to make it look like a macro photograph, so I merged all the layers and applied the Lens Blur filter using a gradated layer mask as a depth map to mimic shallow depth of field. Then I adjusted it 'til I got the areas I wanted in focus and voila!

I really enjoyed creating this.. I love playing around with type and trying out new things.

Enjoy!