I was tasked with making a poster for the Book Drive in my service, Room to Read. The book drive is an opportunity to donate your old books to local schools, in this case, in Jaffna and is a relatively often occurrence in our school. I was unfamiliar with making a poster for a book drive since I’ve never done it before and also couldn’t find any previous posters, but I also was told I could do whatever with the poster just as long as the proper text was there which made me feel a little less anxious about the task.

Opening up a new Canva poster (my preferred software for poster making), my first task was to create a color scheme for the poster. Previous RtR posters I have made prominently featured orange so that was the color I started with. Then with the text I used a simple white to stand out against the orange and a readable font in Bernoru. This is what my poster looked like at the start:

After a bit of deliberating, I thought it would make for a more striking image if ‘Jaffna’ was in a different color and font to match , so I made it a light yellow and changed the font to ‘Knewave’ as well as resizing some of the text. Here’s how the poster looks now:

And to add some added flare to the poster I used this circle swirl on my poster by enlarging it and placing it as a background for the words.

After making the text I decided to create the visuals for the book drive so I first gathered lots of visuals of book stacks and a desk and put them together to make this image.

It didn’t quite look right with just the image so afterwards I added a picture of a bookshelf behind the image as a background to further strengthen the library motif of the book drive.

But the background looked off putting stuck on without any borders so I used these shapes with curved edges to make a border around the shape.

Before

After

Taking a brief look at my poster now, I realized the text looks really flat on the poster, so bring the text out more I added the ‘lift’ effect to the text which instantly made it pop out much better.

Before

After

Then to finish off my poster, I put the body text in, and I changed around some of the colors to be able to color code words to convey the important bits of the poster. The background image of the poster was changed to gray to be able to use orange for the text and to make the bright colors pop out more.

Final design