We’ve recently been working with a rock-star poster artist on new posters for our in-person workshops.

Here are the earliest sketches that this artist prepared for us one morning:

Early Sketches of The Design Patterns Workshop

We liked the sketch on the left and gave the artist some further ideas on how he could develop it.

That led to his next sketch:

Further Sketch of The Design Patterns Workshop

Everyone loved this sketch, so the artist crafted this version of the poster:

Crafted Version of The Design Patterns Workshop

The above crafted version was very good yet some said they thought the word “Patterns” was hard to read.

The artist mentioned that the lettering was typical of rock star posters, but he’d change it anyway if we liked.

He revised the lettering, but kept everything else the same.

Several days passed and as I looked at the poster, something was bothering me.

I looked over early sketches of the poster and then it hit me: I liked the colors used on the early sketch way more than the muted ones used in the crafted version.

After some communication about that, our artist proceeded to refine the poster like so:

Refined Version of The Design Patterns Workshop

What occurred during this process of coming up with a beautiful new poster?

  • Rapid, inexpensive sketch creation.
  • Elimination and selection of a sketch.
  • Elaboration of the sketch.
  • Crafting the poster.
  • Refining the poster.

In other words, we journeyed through the artistic process.

To produce great works, do what artists do:
Sketch, Craft and Refine.