This document summarizes the production stages for promotional materials for a martial arts DVD and poster. The stages included an initial idea to promote a martial arts film, research of existing materials, and a design process involving thumbnails, sketches, and final designs in Photoshop. Key stages involved finding inspirational sketches online, selecting a background color, and hand drawing sketches before finalizing the poster and DVD cover designs.

1. Unit 19: Digital Graphics

2. Promotional Material
 The Brief:
In this unit I was instructed to design 2
promotional materials (ranging from
CD/DVD cover and poster/flyer, games
cover and poster, Website, book covers)
for a client. In this case, seeing that I
have finished creating my designs, I will
now discuss the stages of its production.

3. Production Stages:
 Initial Idea
 Research
 Design process: thumbnails
sketches, final designs and specification
sheet.

4. Initial Idea:
 Promotional Material: CD/DVD cover and
poster/flyer
 Material promotion genre: Martial Arts
On June 16th 2011, my initial idea came to me as a
result of my deep interest in Martial Art films. In many
ways, martial arts films are unique because they
project interesting storylines, solid
Chinese/Japanese setting, characters, fight
scene's, costumes e.t.c. Furthermore, from my
personal view, watching martial arts films have
profoundly captivated and inspired me. And so for
this reason alone, I decided to take on the task of
designing a Martial Arts CD/DVD cover and
poster/flyer.

5. Research:
 I used the internet to search for some
existing promotional material and annotate
examples of martial arts films.
 While using the internet, I also browsed
www.google.com to look for interesting
drawn sketches in order to brain storm
some ideas for my design.
 And lastly after gathering some
promotional material and annotate
examples, I identified the genre’s and
gave brief details of the product CD/DVD
cover and poster/flyer.

6. Researched Films:

7. Researched films:

8. Researched films:

9. Design process:
1. I searched for similar DVD cover and
poster of my material promotion.
2. I searched for some sketches and pictures
on Google images.
3. I drew some sketches and decided on the
colour to be used in my design (red, black
and white)
4. After finishing my sketches, I hand picked
two of my best drawings and edited them
on Adobe Photoshop CS5 (which included
adjusting the levels, unsharpened and
colour balance).

10. Thumbnail sketches:
 Before starting my design. I searched the
internet for interesting sketches ( of ninjas and
samurai’s) done by other people. Now, the
reason I took some of those sketches is
because of the following reasons:
 I’m not very good with imaginative drawing.
 Seeing the sketches where free and legal
from Google images, I decided to save them.
 To grab some idea’s on how to design my
CD/DVD cover and poster/flyer. I also
searched for pictures I can use as the
background colour for my design.

11. Sketches:

12. Sketches:

13. Sketches: internet

14. Reasons I selected this
sketches:
1. The subjects are well sketched and
composed.
2. The sketches has a martial art theme.
3. The sketches are visually action.
4. The subjects are well posed.
5. The sketches show facial expression
and weapons.

15. Background Colour:

16. Final Design and specification:
Poster/Flyer

17. Final Design and Specification:

18. Reasons I selected this Final Design
and Specification :
1. It is simple and straight forward.
2. It grabs the attention of its target
audiences (age 18).
3. The designs meets the criteria set I was
aiming for.
4. It has legal permission for producing
(websites, sketches, existing promotional
material, soft ware programme).
5. It covers all the aspects of effective
design.