Ticket to the Knife Show

About This Project

Product Advertisement

Digital Photography, Digital Image Manipulation, Layout Design

The Rocky Mountain College of Art and Design

Sketches

Being an enthusiastic cook and having purchased a lovely new sushi knife, I immediately settled on the idea of a cooking knife advertisement. Cangshan is a good, if not especially well-known, knife brand. The resultant limited brand presence afforded me creative space for designing the advertisement.

Color and Font

Kusanagi is a font that is appropriate for specific applications. It was a font created with a cyberpunk or sci-fi aesthetic in mind. While this piece was neither, I felt the sharpness of the font was appropriate for the title.

For the secondary font I chose Franklin Gothic Demi. It is an easy to read font, with enough blockiness that I felt it echoed Kusanagi without mirroring it too closely.

This set it apart but made it not look out of place.

I sampled a darker red from the picture of the chef holding the bowl for the red accent color. This helped link both sides aesthetically.

The ability to take product photography and to create your own stock image catalog are both extremely valuable skills. This piece was created for a Photography For Designers class. Not only was it useful, but it also afforded me the opportunity to get an actual DSLR camera and write it off on my taxes. Thank you, taxpayers!

Subject Photography

The first leg of the project was to take photographs of the poster's subject. The second shot was the trickiest, as getting the knife to stay upright required some ingenuity. Fortunately, I had a pack of extremely strong neodymium magnets which I could affix to the back of the knife, thus keeping it upright. Science!

Web Banner and Advertisement

The final results were a 3:1 rectangle web banner and a magazine advertisement. You might see the former if you forget to update your ad blocker and the latter if you pick up a copy of National Geographic while waiting in a doctor’s office.