A (98)

CREATE A COLOURFUL RETRO TRAVEL POSTER INSPIRED BY

AUTUN PURSER’S FANTASTIC TRAVEL DESTINATIONS SERIES

DESIGN A

VINTAGESTYLE

TRAVEL POSTER

T

ravel posters have long been used to

advertise the delights of distant lands and

cities. In the 1940s and 50s, British travel

poster design reached its zenith, with the

iconic rail and London Transport posters exhorting

customers to leave the cities at weekends to enjoy

the countryside.

Photoshop is an ideal application for the design of

such retro posters. The ability to work up individual

elements in isolation, then import and reposition as

distinct layers within a composition, makes the

fine-tuning of a final image more straightforward

than it was for pioneer travel poster artists.

Historically, printing technology was partly

DETERMINE LAYOUT AND REQUIRED ELEMENTS

SKETCH A ROUGH POSTER OUTLINE AND BUILD ELEMENTS

responsible for the limited colour palettes employed

by many poster artists. This limitation meant that

trying to replicate the natural colours of a location

was not possible, and that bright, high-contrast

colours were often used to depict a scene instead. By

setting up Photoshop colour swatches, this approach

to colouration can be reproduced.

In this tutorial you will design a poster advertising

‘Wild England’, an imaginary England introduced in

the 1885 novel After London by Richard Jefferies. You

will learn how to produce block colour elements

from sketches and integrate these with text and

textures within the Photoshop environment to create

effective retro posters.

01

ROUGH LAYOUT SKETCH

You will produce a bold, block-colour travel

poster from a number of design elements. You will

base your poster on those produced in the 1950s by

London Transport. An online archive of these posters

is available at http://www.ltmcollection.org. The first stage

in designing such a poster is to draw a rough layout

sketch from which to work (provided in the source

files – ‘roughlayoutsketch.psd’).

02

COLLECT SOURCE PHOTOGRAPHS

Although you are producing a stylised

block-colour travel poster for a location from fiction,

it is preferable wherever possible to work from life or

photographs. In the source files, photographs are

provided that were taken specifically based on the

rough layout presented in step 1, (‘referencephotos’

folder). Websites such as http://www.deviantart.com are

also useful sources of source material.

03

SKETCH OR TRACE ELEMENT OUTLINES

The elements that make up the poster will

be block colour components with a black outline.

Depending on your confidence with traditional pen

and ink sketching or your access to a stylus/graphics

pad, you can either sketch out on paper the element

outlines for scanning (step 4), or alternatively load

the source photos into Photoshop and produce the

outlines there (step 5).

FROM SKETCH TO POSTER

WORK IN

PROGRESS

Progress 1: Rough layout sketch

Progress 2: Colour and

import foreground layers

Progress 3: Close-up

inspection

AUTUN PURSER

http://www.apillustration.co.uk

@apillustration

OUR EXPERT

Autun Purser is a freelance graphic

designer best known for his range of

colourful travel posters, advertising

the delights of locations from fantasy

and science-fiction novels.

SOURCE FILES

All design elements used in the

poster are available for free

download via FileSilo.co.uk/

bks-609, as black and white and

coloured elements. Also provided

are the source photographs used in

designing these.

VINTAGESTYLE TRAVEL POSTER