Photoshop | Poster Design

This evening I decided to continue working on my project and move onto getting the poster design up and running. Surprisingly after sitting down for a few hours I've come up with something I'm really happy with; this never usually happens. I decided to incorporate both the front and back cover onto my poster, and use some elements from my front cover to advertise the book itself. 

Having a large image of Mole gives someone, who's merely passing by a poster, something to grab their attention. And after all this is the exact job of the poster. I made a pair of fake 3d books using some simple techniques in Photoshop CS5, with these being the main focus of the poster it was essential they looks really top notch. 

I began by pulling in the front and back cover from Illustrator as a smart object. I soon realised these weren't editable and so I had to right click on the layers in the layer palette and convert them into raster layers (pixels). I then went to Edit - Transform - Perspective. This allowed me to add some perspective to each of the covers to begin my fake 3d style. I then made up two oblong shapes to act as the pages, and again I transformed them using the perspective function. After that I recoloured the oblongs with a dull sandy tone which I thought was a great match for a real book page. To finish these off I added some black lines from top to bottom on the oblong shapes to act as page lines using the line tool, and then finally some shadowing using the brush tool on a 0% hardness setting to create some contrast between the books and to add depth.

After that I added a large image of Mole in, and i also imported the snow pattern I created in Illustrator. Mole is the  lower centre piece to balance out the large text found at the top of the poster. I chose to use a serif font for the text as I found this most suitable for the crisp design I'd produced so far. I also think it is the most in keeping font style for the books themes. Finally I finished off by adding the authors name along with my name at the very bottom of the poster as I think its important to inclue both the designer and authors names and it helps to again balance the text on the top of the poster. Anyway, enough talking, here's the almost finished product, although I know there will be a big list after crit tomorrow.