Wallpaper imagery for your office? - Astute Financial Cairns
What I love about my job is the variety of things I get to do. It's not all logos and flyers. Recently Cairns Home Loans changed names and became Astute Financial. With this came a move to a new office that needed some warming up and personality. I worked with Interior Designer, Emma Allen, on sorting out all the 'wall' artwork.
In five of the meeting rooms we chose Australian imagery and I then created the artwork for matching quotes that worked in with the photos and its colours. The product we used was a removable wallpaper from Pickawall. I also created a photographic timeline that featured all their previous offices and branches. The effect is fantastic and a talking point.
My other major piece for the office was a photographic collage that spelled out 'Astute'. This was a massive piece that measures 4mt long by over 2mt high. The final artwork was over 300MB! Can't remember how many photos I used!
The idea of this wall was to create a feature wall in the upstairs landing area that used cool blues for the background and warm golds for the lettering (colours of the Astute logo). The first draft was ok, but the blue 'background' photos were too busy in colour and you couldn't make out the wording. So I toned all the background photos with the Astute blue which helped to knock them back thus allowing the gold images/lettering to be seen.
I've done a number of these types of collages before for different things and different sizes...and always come away nearly blind from dealling with so many images at once.
How to do it
Collect all your high resolution images (300dpi)
Resize your images. You can use different sizes, but for this project I used the same size photo throughout - 150x100mm each. Just depends on your project.
Photoshop - in PS I created 6 individual files - 1 for each letter. Then placed the images in the shape of the letter, flattened it, then saved as a high res JPG. I repeated this for each letter. There are a lot of times that I would actually mask the letters in PS, but these files were too large to do that and PS kept crashing on me.
InDesign - I then created the artwork in the correct wall dimensions in InDesign. Don't forget to use your guides for alignment. I used separate layers for the guides, background and each of the 6 letters.
Background - I placed all my 'blue' toned images to make the background first - this took awhile as there were so many and I had to zoom right in to ensure they were all in alignment. Then 'lock' the background layer.
I made the 6 letters of 'ASTUTE' in the size I wanted and in individual text boxes, then converted the letters to 'outlines'. These were also in their own layers.
Then I placed the photographic letters (JPG files) in InDesign. Doing one letter at a time, I 'cut' them (command X), then selected the 'outlined' letter it needed to go into, then Edit>Paste Into. Use your Selection Tool and position the JPG to make sure it is correctly aligned in the letter shape.
Repeat for each letter - then it's done! Then just save for professional printing and good to go!
