Lorena's Portfolio
Exploring Language Through a Digital Composition
The objective of the project was to design a poster that visually captured the meaning of a word in another language different from English. I decided to choose the Spanish idiom “estar en las nubes,” which literally translates to “to be in the clouds”. It’s used to describe a person who is distracted, daydreaming, or lost in thought. I chose this phrase because I think it gives you a lot of creative freedom to design.
My idea was to make a poster of a person sitting somewhere in nature looking at a landscape, but it’s not a regular/traditional landscape, it’s a magical and dreamlike landscape, with different random elements coexisting in the same universe. This would represent what it looks like when you are physically in a place, but your mind is somewhere else.
I started by looking at other designs with a similar dreamy and magical style of what I wanted to convey to get inspiration and create a basic sketch for my poster.
After drafting my idea on paper, I started looking for images that captured the essence of the poster on free stock websites such as Unsplash. Some of the images used in the posted are:
I brought the images into Photoshop and created these early drafts:
To achieve the desired result, each of the images were composited using masks, then I applied adjustment layers such as brightness/contrast, exposure, saturation, etc., to each element separately to make the elements have a similar color grading and create the impression that they belong to the same scenario.
This was the first finished version that was posted to receive feedback from peers and the professor:
Peers suggested making more adjustments to the woman and the castle in the background to make them fit more with the rest of the composition. The professor suggested adding elements that will create the impression that the woman is sitting in an urban setting and is imagining that natural landscape; thus, the poster’s meaning of “physically being in a place, but your mind is somewhere else” is reinforced. Additionally, adjusting the shadow of the text to increase the legibility. To create the ambience of an urban setting, I decided to made as if she is sitting on a concrete floor. This is the final version:
