Thanksgiving Dinner Flier Yet Again!

So it’s that time of year where I design the Thanksgiving Dinner posters/fliers for my church.

This time I’m working from the fliers up. Before, I used to work from poster down. But i figure, since the flier is going to be seen and distributed more, I should put more effort into that. The difference between the flier and the poster is that the poster is a full 8.5in by 11in page, while the flier is a 5.5in by 8.5. In other words, they aren’t proportionate.

I’m going to show you my thought process. AND SOME PICTURES! i know you all love pictures.

Here we go:

I must apologize for some of the images that are in this post. Some of them… actually one of them is very gross and work that i did before I knew anything about graphic design. This is the first Thanksgiving dinner poster I made for my church:It’s pretty bad. Copperplate is the most overused font and it makes no sense being used here… It’s horrible and ugly… I must say. But then we get to last year’s poster… This is after I took my typography class and learned all about type and how to use it:

I like this one… it is a thousand times better than the first one… but the hierarchy is kind of weird. I can’t really tell how I would read it if it were my first time reading it. I think my eye would go to the image of the turkey first then read thanksgiving dinner. Then when you get to the address and date… you’re not really sure what to read or which one is more important. I think it should be read… date then address but it’s just kind of weird going back up to read the address. then back down to read that “dinner starts at 5:30…”. I’m also not sure about the font for “Thanksgiving Dinner” it’s a bit boring. That type works well for paragraphs of text but it looks pretty weird as a title.

Anyway. that’s my critique of my own work from last year.

Now on to this year!!!

Coming into this I knew that I wanted something edgier and more “in your face.” Something humorous like the little “it’s FREE” coming from the turkey would be nice too.

Well here’s where i started:

I’m not sure what it reminds me of… (computer icons maybe?) but i took almost everything from last years poster. I fixed everything that I didn’t like about last years poster but my mom and brother didn’t really like it. Maybe it was the split between Thanks and Giving but they weren’t digging it.

So i played around somemore. That’s when i realized that these were supposed to be invitations… or they could be used as invitations. And invitations aren’t poster size, they are envelope size. so I switched my thinking to focus on the flier more than the poster and that’s when I came up with this:

YUmmy yummy white space. I really like this but it needed something thanksgiving-y to set it off. So i tried to think of ways i could use a turkey and my instincts just told me i needed a giant one!! so i drew it:

it’s totally Wallace and Gromit-y!!! (and a cannibal apparently) I was kind of afraid that people might look at the turkey first before thanksgiving dinner so i made another change…

Now thanksgiving dinner will definitely be read first. And then the little tongue joke reads better.

So that’s where I am right now. Tell me what you think about any of the designs. I’m planning on cleaning up the turkey and playing around with its color… even though the flier is going to be in black and white… I also want to put a knife and fork in the turkey’s hands… hahaha we’ll see how those both will come out. Thanks for checking this stuff out.

-Justin.