Animal Project Part II: Animal Poster

Creating a poster in Illustrator for the Barton Springs Salamander

For March 16, 2021

We’re onto the next segment of our project, which is making a poster in Illustrator! Our first task was to thumbnail as many iterations as we could, so I got to work with a ballpoint pen.

During class, we talked briefly about wanting to make the poster from the animal’s point of view, so though I played with the idea of having a “zoom in” bubble to show the salamander in the context of the habitat we’re familiar with, I instead decided to go with showing it on a salamander scale.

We also talked about subtly incorporating a narrative into the piece about why the animal is endangered. This got me a little bit stuck: the reason the Barton Springs Salamander is listed as endangered is just because there aren’t that many of them in the first place, and the city got them listed as protected so that they had a legal basis on which to protect them and because they’re an excellent indicator species for the health of the aquifer. It’s true that people are a cause of concern for it — runoff from construction does lower the water quality and threaten the salamanders — but I’m hesitant to show human activity as people in the water (which is the only way I can really think to do it), since salamander researchers have been adamant that swimming in the Barton Springs Pool doesn’t harm the salamanders, so I wouldn’t want the human presence to be misleading. I’m thinking about perhaps including the silhouette of a crayfish or some larger fish in the background, since they do prey on the salamanders.

I ended up liking the one on the bottom left (with a sloppy star next to it) and the top right of the right-hand page, since I feel like they showcase the salamander prominently, have a nice visual flow, allow for an interesting progression of foreground to background, and have a clean place for text. I’ve also done a bit of thinking about the colors, and I think I could pull off something like that format with only seven colors. I’ll need more iterations to really nail down the design, but I think I’ve got a good start.

For March 18, 2021

I made some iterations of the salamander poster! They didn’t really come out like I wanted — I had a lot going on and I decided to pick sleep over fine-tuning my design, since I have a lot more time this weekend to do a design to my satisfaction — but it was at least nice to start experimenting with some different colors and compositions.

Q had some suggestions for me in class critique that are as follows:

• figure out some way to create a sense of scale and emphasize how small the salamander is, either by showing it rather small or placing an object for reference in the environment
• make the visual flow so that the salamander is the first thing your eye goes to when you look at the page

I tried to keep those in mind, and I did a better job on the latter than the former. I’ll be refining my layout and placement for the next iterations.

I started by writing the text so I would know how much space it was going to take up. I made it correspond to the story I was trying to communicate, some basic information about the salamander, how bit it is, and what preys on it, so I think I’ll have to edit it to match the new compositions I come up with. Then, I got into the design itself.

I always find it difficult to freehand sketch on the computer, so I started this as I started most illustrator files, sketching the design plan by hand and taking a picture of it to import into the file.

Once they were uploaded, I just curvature-tooled and pencil-tooled everything out. The aquatic plants were a bit difficult as I was trying to do them quickly, so they didn’t have quite the density I was aiming for. The background also became far more dense than I would have liked; I wanted the tops to be softer and with more holes to indicate the edges of underwater plants. However, I was quite happy with the shape of the salamander.

I did find it difficult to integrate the salamander with its environment, since it doesn’t share a lot of colors. I think I was a little too literal with the color interpretation; for the next round, I’ll try some that are a little further outside reality to try to establish a mood.

I also think that the vast field of color in the middleground flattens the whole thing out quite a bit, so I’ll be looking to get more depth into my next versions.

I also want to shrink down the salamander to try to give a better sense of its size. I couldn’t come up with an effective way to introduce an object for reference as Q suggested, since most of the things that would reasonably be in the salamander’s environment that people recognize as reference are far to large to be an effective reference, and I couldn’t think of any naturally-occurring objects that were universally recognizable. However, I think by shrinking the salamander, I’ll be able to introduce a better sense of scale.

I suspect critique will reiterate what I already know, but I’ll see if there’s anything new that comes up. Since I’m planning on making my next iterations so different, I’ll see how I can carry over general critique from this one.

For March 23, 2021

Per the class and my personal critique of my last iterations, the things I wanted to focus on were:

• creating a better sense of depth
• creating a middleground and placing the salamander within it (the large, high-contrast fields of color last time were ineffective and distracting)
• decreasing the size of the salamander to better initially communicate its small size
• playing around with color to create different emotions

I also went through and found the rubric, which mentioned creating strong figure-ground relationships, so I wanted to keep that in mind, too.

I worked up a few more thumbnails, then narrowed it down. Last week, Chelsea did a super cool composition with her whooping crane showing both above and below the water. I was inspired by it, since it occurred to me that might be a cool way to show both that the Salamanders live only in Austin and that one of their primary sources of threat is urban development by including a skyline in the background, which would also help me create depth. I also thought that adding a water surface, something which people have a general sense of thickness for, might help create scale.

Once I got the larger thumbnail finished, I popped it into illustrator and started tracing it. Because it’s only Monday yet this week has already been a fever dream for me, I didn’t have the presence of mind to take screenshots as I was working, but following is a list of things that I played around with as I worked and my frank opinions on them:

• The text: I retooled the text to better play along with with the new narrative I was showing of the salamander in the pool with urban development as the main threat (rather than predators as I did last time). I also made the title something more attention-grabbing than “Barton Springs Salamander”. I think it works better at being interesting.
• The placement of the text: though in my thumbnail I had placed the text all within the water, I moved it around so that the title and subtitle were outside of the water, and I liked it quite a bit. The body copy underwater is working alright; I’m unsure if the light text is visible enough on the dark background.
• The plants in the foreground: in a few versions, I added a bit of plant action in the lower left corner to give a better sense of foreground. I like it, but I think I need to fritz with the color a bit more, since I presently have it sharing the color of the trees. It’s difficult to make it so these are the same color with the seaweed being dark enough and the trees being light enough.
• Salamander entanglement in the middleground: in a few versions, I tried looping some seaweed around the salamander’s tail to ground it in the middleground. While I think it is visually nice, it makes the salamander seem like it’s much further back and therefore larger in the composition than I want, so I’ll not be doing that next time.
• Color: I wanted to try some color variations beyond the literal, so I did a version inspired by colors at sunrise and colors at dusk. I like the brighter whites I used as the salamander/water surface color in these, and I like the different vibes they have. I’m liking the sunrise one, which is more pink, since it kind of goes with the “hello, say hi to this salamander!” message I’m going with in the text. I.e., “good morning” is a greeting, but “good night” is usually a goodbye.

Without further ado, here are the iterations for today:

I think if I do more with this color scheme, I’ll just raise the brightness of the whole palette, as this is a bit too dull to really see properly. I do like these colors, however; I think they allow the salamander to be distinctive while not being a total alien to the colors of its environment.

This is my favorite version of the foreground plants.

As mentioned, I like these colors due to the sort of “good morning, come meet this salamander!” energy they give off. I do wonder how well the tree line reads as a tree line when it’s not green.

The dusk variation. I think this one is slightly less effective since the text is too hard to read.

I’m much happier with them this time round than last time — I feel like the style is more consistent and that this iteration is better about the goals I wanted to achieve with better depth, salamander scale, and color usage. Below are my working notes for next time:

• Perhaps fix the tree line to better recede in detail; I think the back part towards the skyline especially is a bit too detailed at the moment
• I like the colors, especially the pink ones. Keep that scheme perhaps and mess with it a bit more to get the trees and foreground seaweed to a more visible place?
• See if I can get the title and subheading closer to the body copy
• Maybe add a bit more detail to the salamander?

I think critique will prove super helpful.

For March 25, 2021

As suspected, critique was very helpful! I got feedback from both Q and Dani. The main comments across both of them were:

• to make the salamander more detailed, in order to push it forwards in the composition more
• to add more detail to the foreground plants, to similarly push them forwards towards the viewer more, by adding some highlights perhaps

Q additionally suggested that I try to make the heading and subheading more contiguous with the body copy, since they felt disjointed, to flatten out the surface of the water since the perspective read wonky, and to smooth out the trees to make them less detailed. Dani suggested that some reflections or water texture would help distinguish the water from the sky.

So, I focused on those as I worked. I tried to make the trees recede in detail more, added some highlights to the salamander’s eyes and gills as well as refining the shadows on it to better show the form, and added a foreground. It’s not yet as detailed as I’d like, but it was helpful to give myself a point of reference as to what will be in the foreground. I also added some water reflections, though I’m not quite happy with the shape yet.

I flattened out the curve of the water a little bit to accommodate all the text being underwater. I think the color of the title may be a bit too close to the color of the water now, though, but I’ll see if any of the other colors work.

I did actually try printing it out this time around to see how it looks at full size. The studio printer hates my computer, so this process was preceded by me downloading, for the third time, the driver for the studio printer, but I finally got it to work for once. It was helpful to see how large the text is, so I know I can scale it down if I need to.

I also changed the inside of the water bubbles to be blue and made them slightly smaller, so it hopefully they’ll read like cross-section bubbles and not like they’re bubbles on the surface of the water (which is I think what Q was talking about when he said something about how the bubbles made for confusing perspective).

For March 27, 2021

I got some feedback from Q and from studio people on the poster! Most of it aligns with stuff I already want to change, but there was some stuff I hadn’t considered, too.

• reduce the weight of the surface texture (Elise said that as is, it sort of looks like ham)
• Q still wants me to further reduce the curviness in the wave, which I agree with where the water meets the treeline but not where the water meets the viewer; I like how dynamic it feels, how it calls to mind that the salamanders live in a spring-fed pool that’s always moving, and how it pulls the viewer’s eye across the page
• have differences in detail in the treeline and in the foreground plants to provide depth within them, like how I’ve done in the middleground
• try putting the title and subtitle in brown to pop them a bit more

I printed out a version of my poster and made a bunch of annotations on it with a ballpoint pen to help me sort my ideas, then jumped into illustrator.

I spent much of the time fussing with the foreground plants. I had multiple people suggest putting some sort of highlights or detail on the plants, but the only color I had in my composition that was dark enough to detail the plants without yanking them to the first thing the viewer sees is the color that’s directly behind them. After a few unsuccessful attempts at highlighting the veins with the color, I found a way I really liked to give them a bit more detail by redrawing the plants with finer and more detailed lines and creating some highlights to indicate the algae they’re growing out from.

Various failed attempts at highlighting the foreground plants in a non-distracting and stylistically consistent way

The ground texture I ultimately ended up using

I finally pulled out one of my favorite Illustrator drawing techniques I often employ for doing flowy lines and vegetation in vector graphics, which is drawing the plants freehand in photoshop, then exporting them as a PNG and uploading them to Illustrator to image trace them and turn them into vectors. This made my life considerably easier than the first time I tried to do the foreground plants.

The rest of the time I spent doing minor composition changes and moving things around per the list of critiques I got — reducing the surface thickness, making the tree detail recede as it goes further back, adding surface texture to the water, changing the title and subtitle to brown to make them pop, and flattening the back surface of the water. I flattened the front a little bit, too, but I kept a bit of the curve per the reasons I specified.

Anyway, here he is! Sammy in his natural habitat. I’m quite happy with how he turned out, honestly — the color limitations was a nice realistic challenge; I haven’t been limited in colors since the last time I did a t-shirt design, so that was a nice skill to be practicing again. It was also the first full project I’ve done in Illustrator in a while. It ended up being more effort than I was anticipating, but I’m happy to see how far it’s come since my first iteration.