Week 7

So what happened after I got my design approved? I am very glad you asked. That is what I want to talk about today.

I had expected I might need to adjust the image for a 16×9 format. Sure enough, when the person in charge of the display saw what I had, he told me it needed to be changed to 16×9. So I took what I had and sat down to change the shape. It was not a simple matter of cropping.

I needed to maintain the balance of the image. I determined which parts of the top and bottom I wanted to crop, and used guide lines to mark the area I intended to keep. I moved the large cross down, and some of the grunge with it. I had to move the "echoes" of course. The main logo got moved as well. The trouble came in balancing all those elements in a shorter space.

By now you can probably tell I did not work with a grid on this. Not a strict grid anyway. The large cross and the logo are aligned in specific places on the image. The intersection of the bars in the small cross of the logo is vertically centered and horizontally a third of the way in from the right edge. The vertical bar of the large cross is centered on a guideline one-sixth of the way in from the left edge, and the top edge of the horizontal bar rests on a guideline one-sixth of the way down from the top.

The placement of the echoes, however, was done by instinct. Which is not say it was done without thought. The placement of each echo was considered, examined, evaluated and adjusted many times. Where the echoes were placed impacted the balance and the visual interest of the whole image. And they became even more important to the balance when the main logo was removed (so they could scroll text over it).

But the fun did not end there. Because in that same conversation where I was told I needed to make a 16×9 image, I was told that the main screen, the one in the middle, the one that served as the backdrop for the stage, was about 3×1 (that was not entirely accurate, but it was close enough). Which is to say, three times as wide as it is tall. That is considerably wider than 16×9. And significantly narrower. Clearly, I needed to come up with something new.

Not completely new. It needed to fit in with the image that would be used on the side screens, the 16×9 image. Luckily, I had another image (from psdgraphics.com) with the yellow caution stripes on a dark grunge background. It did have the stripes at the top and bottom, but I had to transform it into the appropriate shape. I copied the image, pulled the copied image up to where it needed to be, and used a layer mask to hide what I did not need. I then used some other textures to further rough up the image. I did not have time to remake the dressed look on the cross and the logo, so they were copied and pasted. I considered adding some of the echoes, but that only crowded the image. Besides which, I did not want this to be a repeat of the 16×9 image, just something that could comfortably sit along side it.

Still, it needed something to add more visual interest. So after pulling the large cross to the right, I rotated the logo and cross together. This gave me exactly what I wanted. And that is the image that was used on the large, middle screen.

(taken with the camera on my phone)