I'm not Stealing! I'm paying homage!

Don't steal!  Stealing within design or elsewhere is wrong…. However… it's perfectly ok to pay homage to someone else's work.  So don't steal.  Just pay homage to a design you like within your own ;-). 

But, all kidding aside, sometimes when you don't have any concrete ideas of where to to take a design, mimicking someone else's can get you started.  And getting started is always the hardest part.  Not only that, but once you get started and have things on screen to work with, you can mix and match the different elements that you've "homaged"  in order to make the design your own.  And this was the case with the Print and Graphics Scholarship Foundation poster I created for their design competition.

At first I wasn't sure what direction I wanted to take my design.  So after a quick Google search, I looked at a couple of posters of previous applicants.  Including. last years winner. 

The previous year's winner. It's a bit too intense for me.  Really bright colors are splashed everywhere and the layout is a bit all over the place.
 

I like the simple color scheme and layout of this poster.

So after deciding to "pay homage" to the design above, I looked back at some of my previous work and found something I made earlier that I could also "homage" from.

Something I made when trying to create a logo.

After I had these elements and ideas on screen, it didn't take too much time to put them together into something new.

My Final Design.  PGSF Scholarship Poster

Thanks for reading! If you'd like to see more of my graphic work or photography be sure to check out my Flickr and Facebook.  And if you have any comments, suggestions or critiques feel free to leave them below ;-).