This week my wife and I travelled to Melbourne to see a "Pink" concert and during the days we went to see two exhibitions, one of Monet and the other of Australian artists who studied in France at the turn of the century. The last exhibition was housed in the Ian Potter centre. This modernistic building has skewed walls and is all angles. We were quite impressed, so I took some pictures. I thought it would be fun to try and make a poster for the exhibition showing some of the inside of the building. I was taken in by the stairs and windows. To balance the poster I did the writing on a large uninteresting panel and door. C@C invited. click on the image for a larger view


To find out more about this building look at Melbourne Federation Square

I like it. Awesome modern building shot.
I'd probably toss a black panel up on the left hand side under the text, with opacity set to about 30%.
Two reasons for this:
1. It will add some separation to allow people to enjoy the angularity of your building without having to visually seek out the boundaries of your text (and provides breathing space and clarity for the text as well).
2. It will help mask the disturbing amount of brightly coloured film grain on that side (you may want to desaturate that a bit).

Also, there is an extra space between "the" and "impressionists" in your text at the bottom.

Cool place!

Also, think about making this in B&W. That helps situations where there is a lot of film grain as well.

Looks good the text is readable without dominating the image and the photo makes you want to go just to see the building. Excellent.

I thought the film graining was all intentional.

@ CRogers, yes you are right, there was an extra space in the writing. I include an updated version with your suggestion of an underlying blackish bedding for the text. I tried just the lower caption but found it unbalanced, so I did the same for the other text and used a layer mask to "unmask" the little notice board. I am not convinced that the under lie of a blackish (46% normal) is beneficial but I agree that it defines the text area.

@ He4rty Yes the grunge is intentional. Sort of!. This was a shot that was badly underexposed. I shoot in raw and jpeg (an entry Digital SLR camera, Canon EOS450D) and during the recovery of the raw cr2file I got these beautiful grungy artifacts. So I tried to exploit these. I have correctly exposed images of the same scene, but they are not as interesting.
I tried to accentuate the grunge factor with the halftone effect on some areas of the image.
Click on the image to enlarge

Wow that is quite a place wooble. I like what you did by putting the small dots in and the way you added the text over the door. I think Australia would be a great place to visit.

A professional looking poster. Nicely designed.

Really cool idea.

Almost what I had in mind. I'd run the black all the way from top to bottom, and exclude the text at the base (it doesn't really need it. I'd also decrease the size of the font at the bottom, and maybe the side too. If you post the original base photo I'll take a stab at it to show you what I mean (if you'd like, of course).

I love what you did with the back dots, by the way. I think others mentioned that, but it really works with the contractivism of the building's appearance... in fact, you might try a constructivist approach to using the text to accentuate the lines of the architecture. (with help of the perspective tool).

Thank You Molly, Erisian and Rod.
@K1te, yes I will try another font (Any suggestions, Bauhaus Era?)
@CRogers . I've attached a size and pixel reduced jpg file. This is the starting point. The jpg is a result of working the raw file. NB You talk about Constructivism. Wikied that, and find it very confusing to try and apply to art , unless you are thinking of Russian propaganda poster style?

Hi , I don't think I'll do better than this. I like K1te's suggestion of a different font. I used AR Bonnie for the fancy font and Avant Garde Medium for NGV and the small writing. I think it improved the overall presentation. CRogers, I had a lot trouble using the fonts or text to enforce the angles (constructivism, if I understand it). I am using 2.6.11 and the text editor is limited. Even using outlines and fills (discard text) and manipulating text outlines looked pretty woeful. I'd be interested in seeing what you come up with. NB the painting is by Phillips Fox just google him and you'll get plenty of images. My only regret now is that I did not use an image that does not have the man on the escalator. Never mind it is an exercise. Thanks for your feedback (or should I say critique )

Much better font wooble. I like it.

Very nice results wbool like the new rendition.

Constructivists used angular block fonts to build a structural visual space. This style would go nice with the angular space in your photo. I will attempt to demonstrate this as well.