Science Academy Poster

My next project was a poster for Tommy Rominski, a science academy student at Morristown High School.  For the year, Tommy has been working on a project involving a bike power by solar panels to be energy efficient (see picture of bike on the right) and needs a poster for the science fairs he will be entering (thats where my job comes in).  I have been working on designing a poster for Tommy with his information, pictures and other information on it. Mainly we have shared information through e-mail.  He has sent me powerpoints and word documents and I have kept him up to date on how my end is going.

At the start of the project when I heard what we would have to do I spent some time looking up infographics on the internet.  I got some great ideas on how I wanted to layout and design the poster for Tommy.  I then sketched out a few ideas.  I got some ideas so when I found out my partner and his project, at once I thought of a cool way to use a theme.  Then once I got this theme, I did 2 more sketches with a road for a border (both of which are on the left).  I thought it would be an interesting way to include the bike theme into what is normally a plan poster and I think it turned out well.  Below you will see two examples of my brainstorming ideas on the computer (for the entire project I was using Adobe Illustrator).  I did these two designs just to try and get my ideas on the computer-nothing final.  The one on the left is the first one and I didn't like how it turned out.  I then did the one on the right.  The green boxes represent where the text and information will go.  To the right of that is my color scheme that I want to use for the poster.  I got the color scheme off a website called Kuler.

Then I started to recieve some of his information.  I then began to enter his information into text boxes and played around with the layout some more.  I have had some problems with the spacing between the text words and the border of the rectangle around the text box.  However, I have fixed that, despite it being very annoying, but it looks much better than it did before.

I currently have the first two columns filled with the text that I want there (background, hypothesis, methods, etc.)  Today, Tommy e-mailed me his results so upon completion of this post I will begin adding his results, conclusions, graphs, etc. in the other two columns.  There will be pictures added to the columns once I finish the text part.  I plan on finishing within the next week.  Then I will have a bunch of people from Tommy to Mr. Boothby to Mrs. Colfax take a look at the poster to get feedback on how to improve it.  Then I will make the changes and have it printed and given to Tommy for his upcoming science fairs.  Below is what I have done so far, and there will be a follow up post at the completion of the project with the final version.