mirage design

Sometimes you want to create a particular theme or "feel" to something. Something that triggers an emotional response in the viewer. It can be an intimidating task trying to recreate what you see in your mind's eye, but with a little planning it's not as hard as you might think.

The key is to break things down into individual components.

For example, mirage design was recently asked to create an invitation with a "Midsummer Night's Dream" theme. The client (the local school swimming club) had a very clear idea of what they wanted - champagne in the background with words reflecting the theme of the evening sprinkled over the top with something down the bottom (but no clear idea what). So there were three very clear components required to the image.



At this point I have to confess my ignorance - I've never read A Midsummer Night's Dream (I've not even seen the movie!). So I did a little research on the net to get some idea of the plot and the setting. Once I'd done that, it was much easier to determine what that final component should be.

First the champagne. "Easy," I thought. A bottle of champagne, a large vase, lots of bits of tinfoil, marbles and bicarbonate soda later I had a couple of blurry images that were dark and seemingly useless! (Hey I never said I was a master photographer!)

Second the text. LOVE your thesaurus. It is your best friend and it never lies. It introduces you to words that you never even knew existed! A "Roman" style font was an obvious choice. Text done.

Lastly the feature element. We produced three samples here.

The first was a fairy on a lilly. Nice photo of a lilly that I had lying around (more successful than the champagne anyway) made that part easy. Trying to convince my twelve year old (tomboy) daughter to dress up as a fairy and have her photo taken was another matter. In the end I gave up and worked with an illustration. But the client felt the fairy in the illustration looked a little aggressive (okay so she did have a slightly Amazon look to her).

The second was a series of roman columns from a photo of a ruin. Not bad, but kind of floated on the page and left the whole thing looking a little bit "nothing".

Finally the solution we had been looking for was found right under our noses. There I was sneaking out the front for a moment of quiet at the school ball when I looked up to behold the front of Brisbane Town Hall. "Eureka!" I cried and started furiously snapping pictures. Unfortunately I was cold and shivering...you guessed it - blurry, dark images. But I had a secret weapon!

Photoshop. Now let me stress right now it is much better to start with a good image than to fix a bad one. But, when you have no option, you can create minor miracles with Photoshop and a little knowledge.

First some serious lightening of the champagne image and a pale yellow colour overlay to brighten it up and give it a golden shade (hey it was only cheap champagne after all). A little bit of cloning to fill in the gaps and to cover parts where the rising bubbles looked like little scratches and things were starting to look much better.

The image of the Town Hall got much the same treatment, only a lot of cutting and pasting to get rid of the bright red banners in the foreground. Then it was masked off from the night sky and the clock tower removed.

Finally the text. A simple Illustrator file exported into Photoshop.

The final result - a dreamy image that conveys the theme of the invitation (and I don't look like such a bad photographer after all!).

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By Jane Long of mirage design. Please visit www.miragedesign.com.au for additional articles and resources on marketing and design for small business.

Labels: image editing, photography