Broadside Booklet Process
For our broadside booklet, we had to choose a historical event and created a poster that also functioned as a booklet to convey the narrative. When I started, I was thinking about doing the launch of Windows Xp, as I’m really interested in the 90s and early 2000s Windows aesthetic. For my first iteration, I was playing around with using the different windows within the desktop for creating the poster. When I was playing around with this design, I realized I was having a lot of fun messing with the MS Paint interface in creating the center title.
I then decided to pivot to focusing on the development of MS Paint as my historical event, as I felt the design of the poster could have a really free, handmade quality, which is a style enjoy working with. For the second iteration, I created the poster inside of the MS Paint interface, and had a lot of fun making all the little sketches. It still however felt too compressed and boxed in. For my audience, I was trying to focus on making the design really accessible and friendly, open to anyone interested in learning about the history of MS Paint.
For my third iteration I broke the walls of the interface and used the top bar and color palette in order to keep the poster structured. This really free’d up what I could do with the design.
I then set out to recreate the tool icons, color palette and window bar in illustrator. It was kind of challenging at first making pixel art in illustrator, but I got used to it really quick and was happy with how they all came out.
For my final poster, I wanted to integrate all of the tools I made into the design to make everything feel very interactive. It was additionally very helpful that I had the MS Paint color palette as I then used only those colors to create a cohesive color profile throughout the project.
I was really happy with how the final poster came out, I think it’s really fun and inviting which was what I was trying to achieve throughout the project. It was also my first time in class working with a lot of body text, and writing and formatting was definitely a new challenge. I’m really happy with how I pushed my type on this project, I think there’s some interesting moments when the tools interact with the type, and it gave a pretty cohesive story of the history of MS Paint. I chose a pixelated font in order to keep with the early 2000s Windows aesthetic.
Overall, I think I was more focused on creating the booklet rather than the poster, but I think it functions well as both. I’m happy with how the project came out and really enjoyed making it!