I love minimalistic designs for basically everything. From posters, to jewelry, minimalism is just really cool to me, so naturally I was drawn to the assignment, Minimalist TV/Movie Poster which is worth 3.5 stars. This assignment presented the perfect opportunity to make my design Wire related and that is exactly what I did. I made my poster a TV poster for the The Wire that draws in an element from Season 2 Episode 9: Stray Rounds.

To make this poster, I used Pixlr, per usual mostly because I don’t want to have to restart my laptop into Windows to use Photoshop or go to the ITCC or Library just for Photoshop. I set my canvas to 768 width 1024 height, which is one of the many presets, just rotated 90 degrees. I knew what I wanted my text to say, “The Wire is spot on.” which is not only a reference to McNulty’s code word the episode, but is also a very simple tagline for the poster. So in order to kind of play on the word spot, I played around a black and dark grey radial gradient in order to create a literal spot on the poster. I also knew I wanted the two lines of text to be diagonal from each other, so that is how I situated where I wanted the gradient spot to be. Next I played around with the text. I ended up using the font “Superclaredon” since I didn’t think a sans serif font would do the intense drama that The Wire is, justice. The color of the text is copper, or #b87333 (according to ColorHexa, which is my favorite site to find color hex codes) because on the The Wire they do a lot of wire tapping, and although i don’t quite know how that works, I do know that old telephone wires (as some today used by the Feds) were made out of Copper. So the text color is an homage to the old telephone wires.

Next, I knew I wanted to add in an audio wave, and make it blue, like it is on the show’s theme song sequence. So I used the drawing tool to make lines freehand and then color in the shape. I then duplicated the layer with my audio wave shape and vertically inverted it to make my audio wave have waves on both the top and bottom. After that, I added a noise filter and a scanlines filter to the whole audio wave to give it some texture. However, some of my audio wasn’t showing up blue after filling it in, so I decided to add a gaussian blur to the whole wave. Lastly, I thought my gradient background needed some texture as well so I added a square pointinize filter to the background since I thought that made the background slightly resemble the caging in the back of police cars.

And that’s how I made the poster! As you can see a lot of detailed work went into making a minimalist poster, and I will admit that I played around with more effects but I didn’t mention which ones since I did not end up sticking with them. I find that personally when I just play around with different tools or filters or effects I end up stumbling upon what I was trying to convey or what I envisioned from the beginning.