XD Brownbag poster
Created
13 April 2007
Requirements
This illustration is just one example of a series of snack-time mashup of objects culled from the XD Brownbag seminar series at Adobe. (XD is the Experience Design team at Adobe.) As casual discussions are held during the lunch hour in the lobby of the San Francisco office, the food-themed posters portray the speakers' character by playing on their more peculiar eating habits.
The poster art is drawn up at screen resolution and later scaled, because this enables me to build up the shapes more quickly and get into the "drawing light," which is where the real magic of Fireworks comes in. Its incredibly intuitive gradient opacity controls and the Ellipse gradient's multi-handle directional controls allow a drawing approach that mimics the real behavior of light. Solid objects have a primary base color and separate slices of cast light, bright highlights, and shadows to build up volume and surface.
After the illustration is completed, it is scaled up to print resolution in Fireworks. (Eat a snack during this process, as big resolutions is one thing Fireworks isn't entirely happy with.) This large PNG illustration is then taken through Adobe Photoshop to output a transparent PSD, and finally into Adobe Illustrator for layout, typography, and output for the final, print-resolution 24" × 36" poster.
You can find more examples of these posters at rhworks.com.
