My first custom project: A movie poster!
I was thrilled when my dear friend Vanessa reached out to me with a task. She is a director and writer of the short film Bloody Loafers and they were in need of a movie poster. Obviously, I jumped at the chance to work with her and take on my very first entirely custom project.
I learned a lot along the way which you can read about below but first, I want to show off where we ended up. Here’s the final product! The poster really reflected the overall vibes of the short and I couldn’t be happier with where we ended up.
The final Bloody Loafers poster made by Created by KG LLC
What I learned…
The first step was a discovery call. I wish I had prepped questions less specific to the needs of the project and more about inspiration and vibes. But we were able to get the information we really needed in that first call. Leaving that conversation, I presented five concepts.
Because this was a poster, I wanted to mock up my concepts in IRL situations to see what they would look like at scale. The poster mockup ended up being tremendously helpful for the client. I will absolutely be doing this in the future to ensure clients can see what designs will manifest as outside of a little screen.
The client wanted to proceed with the first option leveraging the illustrated loafer title (which was my fave as well). When I got her revisions, I was so focused on ensuring her edits were made that I lost my vision along the way. I did exactly what she asked, which was actually to the detriment of the piece. I didn’t fully incorporate the edits into the design in a way that maintained it’s integrity. Which brings me to probably my biggest learning of the entire process: Accept edits but maintain your vision for the overall design. I needed to provide my POV as the artist and trust that the client wanted to hear that from me.
In the end, we landed on that beautiful design up top that hit her notes AND mine. This was the nicest client I could’ve asked for with my first project but I loved when she asked “what do you think?” Looking back, I wasn’t communicating well what my opinions were. She hired me for my style! I can’t be afraid to communicate what my vision is when incorporating edits.
Overall, huge learning, can’t believe I got paid to have fun with this design. I am so grateful to my client, Vanessa and the partnership we had on this project. :)
