Midterm — Becca.

I had a lot of fun with this project. I decided to invent a banner for a completely imaginary webpage, pretending I was the owner of a bookstore in downtown Portland. (The Moon's Daughters as the name of the business is swiped, with apologies, from China Miéville, one of my favorite authors.)

I wanted to create a graphic that was unusual and eye-catching, but elegant and simple at the same time. My hypothetical audience are literary nerds — fond of science fiction, fantasy and unusual settings — so I came up with the idea of three moons over a shadowy city.

I started with a plain black backdrop, then highlighted it with faint gray so that I could blend in the image of the Portland skyline. I desaturated it and set it to the Soft Light blend mode. Where the backdrop was gray, it showed up, and where the backdrop was black, it faded out.

For the three different moons, I wanted a realistic effect, so I didn't use blending techniques — I just cut them out and resized them. I redid the placement and the angle of each moon something like five times, and partially faded the one on the right, so they would all look like they were in different phases.

The font for the title is University Roman, and I used Adobe Myriad Pro for the slogan. The text effects — a lunar Outer Glow for the title — didn't show up so well with the smaller font, so I drew a simple black marquee behind the slogan and then outlined it subtly with a smaller Outer Glow.


I wanted to add a menu bar, as several other people have done, but I liked the height of the banner and didn't want to compromise my design by pushing it into a smaller space.

I was very pleased with the result. In fact, although I acknowledge the sovereignty of Powell's, I can't help wishing my imaginary bookstore were a real place. I could use some new reading material.