Mud Race Advertising Poster.

[Destin]

I'm working on a Mud Race poster for my fire dept's annual fundraiser. Basically needs to catch peoples eyes and draw them in. Hence the high contrast color choices and fire engine red font. There is still alot of information to be added to it, but I need to get the layout right before I add more text. It's going to be printed 11x16 and hung around local businesses and such.

What do you think?

 

[Bossy]

Change the font, it looks amateur. Use the fire font on just fire or something, if at all. If you're adding more text, I would take out the raceflag background. Less really is more.

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[MSnowy]

flag is distracting

 

[Destin]

Flag is distracting. Agreed. But unfortunately, I don't have free reign over this project and have to do what I'm told. I made the mistake of showing them the flag in a ROUGH sketch (literally, 30 second sketch with a pencil) and they liked it, and won't let me remove it.

I could always make it more transparent or something though.

 

[Bossy]

You're the designer, just tell them you wont be able to read the font if you have it. Or put it where the black is, on top, and then have the middle white for the deets. or scoot the hole thing up so the mud man is in the middle, leaving about a third/a quarter below him in white for the fine print.

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[Joey_Ricard]

You're the designer, just tell them you wont be able to read the font if you have it. Or put it where the black is, on top, and then have the middle white for the deets. or scoot the hole thing up so the mud man is in the middle, leaving about a third/a quarter below him in white for the fine print.

Something behind the flag and lessen the opacity, busy it up a bit in that area
Agreed, font is Valentine day like, stand out is good, kiddy like is not

 

[o hey tyler]

Font Squirrel | Show All Free Fonts
Check out that site for fonts, it's a great resource and they're all free for commercial usage.

The ones you have up there are too amateur looking... And you have 3 fonts for 3 lines of text. Probably a bit overkill in terms of number of fonts.

You might also want to try a drop shadow on the rider to give it more separation from the flag behind him.

 

[MSnowy]

You might also consider taking part of the header and making it into a footer. Put the raffle part in the footer with an larger date. This will also eliminate some of the flag in the overall poster

 

[Tony S]

I'd say take the text about the raffle tickets in the red field and drop that down into the mud at the bottom 1/4 of the image. The whole top end is just too busy and it really took a bit for my eyes to focus on that to read it.

Also, does the East Pembroke Fire Department have a logo they use? Include that in the poster somewhere. Their website has a saying on it you might think about incorporating some way if no logo... "100% volunteer 100% of the time"

 

[Big Mike]

If you can't take the flag out...reduce it. The first thing I noticed, was all the 'dead' space between the rider and the text above.
If you have to stick with that aspect ratio, make the rider bigger and make the text section bigger. Maybe reduce the opacity of the flag section.

 

[brush]

...but I need to get the layout right before I add more text.

This is a mistake. My day job is design & I CONSTANTLY have clients insisting they'll add the copy after I finish designing something. I design for 3 words, they want to put 3 paragraphs. That's an extreme example, but the point is you need to lay out your entire design just like composing a photo. Even 1 word changes the composition of the scene. Know what you're working with & you'll have better results. What is the rest of your copy? Where are you going to put it? When you're doing something like a flyer, your copy is as important to the design as the guy on the ATV, if not more. Google some rock posters for inspiration, and yes...lose that fire font. I'd also consider a different treatment for the flag if it's gotta be there, maybe gradient-overlay it on top of the actual background of the image or something...looks strange masked out with a hard edge like that.