Designing a Broadside…and fighting with Adobe Illustrator every step of the way

Ah, the joys and perils of trying to fit an entire prose piece AND an art piece on a single sheet of paper! By the time I completed my Broadside, I had made tiny, 1/8 inch shifts of text and art so much that I was on the brink of yelling at my computer. Despite the fact that the text still feels a bit cramped, I am overall satisfied with my first dive into the world of Broadside design and my first adventure with Adobe Illustrator.

Broadsides are intended to be displayed and enjoyed by passerby on the street or in the park, so my first priority was figuring out what layout would draw viewers in. I wanted to let my art partner’s stunning print of a dog lying in a sunbeam (which we both thought was the most charming line in the associated prose piece, Little Dogs) be the first aspect of the Broadside that drew the eye. Initially, I popped it in the center of the Broadside, but that was so disruptive to the text (which is supposed to be laid out in specific paragraphs) that I settled for putting it on one side. In order to make the art piece “pop,” I knew I had to make the background a bit darker, and this is where my idea of setting a sunny sky as the backdrop first emerged. Was it painful to figure out which sky photos to select and how to adjust their opacity just right in order to avoid drowning out the text? Yes, most definitely. However, I had the opportunity to get especially creative with the backdrop by overlaying one sky picture on top of the other one. The result is a blue sky with a few faint clouds in it. I discovered after experimenting with layering different images on top of each other that I could make the light appear to come from one side of the page, so I finalized the location of the artwork: in the bottom righthand corner, where it truly seems as though the little dog is lying in a sunbeam that is sneaking through a window from a place outside the page. In working with background images and textures, less is usually more, but in this case, some design complexity was helpful.

As for the text, I opted to put the first line of each paragraph in white. Each of these lines emphasizes the “little dog,” and I love the simplistic rhythm that is produced when readers have to pause on each beginning line. This is why I did not want to mess with the text too much, either by only including excerpts or making it into a different shape—the beauty of the prose piece lies in its rhythm. The author returns to the image of the “little dog” countless times, and this makes the writing piece comforting. My two biggest challenges with the text were figuring out the margins (how could I expand the margins to make it look less cluttered without making it too big for the page?) and determining whether or not to add a drop shadow. The drop shadow makes the sky appear as a bit “stormier,” but I ultimately determined that the text is not readable without it. If I had more time, I would have figured out how to make the drop shadow less noticeable—it will require a bit of additional experimentation with Illustrator, and I am excited to get to know this design tool better.

Working with artists and writers to create a Broadside is a challenging process, and ultimately, the artist and the writer are placing a lot of trust in the designer to create a captivating page without violating the integrity of their work. It is not just a two-way collaboration between artist and writer, but a three-way collaboration between artist, writer, and designer. As an editor who has now learned a thing or two about design fundamentals, I highly recommend partnering up with an artist and writer to make a Broadside—you never know what will happen when you are tasked with putting the art and writing together, especially when you’re new to graphic design software, but it is exhilarating nonetheless.