Design 1
Design one features one of my designs from my photoshop task. I have added a bar on the right-hand side of the postcard. I have used a white font that has a rule set to below the text in colours that help add to the design while not taking away too much from the main image. The design is effective at telling you what the postcard is about. Experimentation could be carried out to make the text more legible and not make the postcard look to blocky.

Design 2
For the second design I decided to go for a more relaxed and simpler look. The only piece of ‘flair’ that has been included into the design is that the type has been ruled below and then I have applied a character style to certain letters that make them drop slightly below the rest of the text on that line. By using paragraph and character styles it made the creation of this postcard very straightforward.

Design 3
This design focuses on the opacity of layers and the use of type with strokes instead of a fill. I reverted back to the original image and just placed it in the back. I then added a layer over the top of this and reduced the opacity of it. Once the text was added the postcard was completed. Again, simplicity in the design does work in this case, the subtly of the type also compliments the postcard.

Final Design
For my final design I tweaked design one to give the text more of a connection to the postcard. The use of drop shadow helps accomplish this, I also lined up the angle of the box to be parallel with the neon triangle. Leaving the overall postcard with a more refined look.

Software tutorials
After watching the tutorial on Adobe help on applying colour and effects my understanding of the software grew and it was easier to work with the tools that were available to me. Being able to use the eyedropper tool to capture the right colours was extremely useful. In addition to this using the eye dropper in combination with swatches allowed for me to create a pallet of colours that I used throughout the design. The tutorial also explains the use of effects such as drop shadow which I ended up using for the box with the text. This helped the text play more of a role on the postcard as it is emphasised by the drop shadow. In future I would like to develop on using layers more effectively, the implementation of using more effects in my work. ‘Effects Tutorial’ the following tutorial shows of how blends and effects work on InDesign. The tutorial also helped me understand how to go about drop shadows as well as the adobe help pages. In addition to this I also watched videos on understanding how to ‘work with layers’. This video did help although it may be seen as a simple concept it was still very important that I fully understood how to work with layers as for my designs it was more important to have multiple layers in use to create certain effects.

Design resources and articles
The David Pearson article helped me develop my ideas looking the different proposals that had been shown. The amount of variation and different ways that the same cover had been presented gave me inspiration to chop and change my own designs. This method of experimenting was effective in my designs as it enabled me to see what worked best. Following on from reading this article I was able to implement this way of working into my own work. I would base my decisions on not just how something looked but instead compare it to different variations of the same element of the given design.