[make] birth poster details

I managed to get the baby birth posters printed and framed and the girls LOVE them.  I had no idea they would be so excited about me putting them up in their room.  Is that a sign that I've been super slack on adding artwork to their room?  I think yes.

So some tips on recreating:

1. I designed the posters in Adobe Illustrator CS5 but you should be able to use the same techniques in other design programs, even PowerPoint for that matter.  Start with an 8 x 10 inch art board and Copperplate Gothic Bold font.  Then add the text and rotate until you get the configuration that you like best.

2. At this point I noticed that I had holes but really didn't want to fill them with more text so I went to handy, dandy, simple PowerPoint and pulled up some Microsoft Clipart.  Find the image you want, insert it into PowerPoint (or again whatever program you would like to use) and then edit as necessary. I found a lotus flower, ungrouped the image and deleted what I didn't like.  The colors were perfect so I didn't change those. Then save the image as a .png file and place it into your Illustrator file.

3. Match the colors of your text to the colors in your image.  I chose an image that had three shade of pink in it so I randomly matched the colors of the text to these three shades.  Add a box around the outside of your art board with the line color matching your text and no fill.

4. At this point, framing comes into play.  If you are using a frame with an opening larger than 8 x 10 then there may be no need to resize.  I opted for an 8 x 10 frame and full bleed just didn't look right.  For a border, select everything on the art board, group it, and then scale the whole thing by 80%.

5. Once you've scaled your poster to fit your frame size, print on card stock, trim (if necessary), frame and hang.  All done.  

Let me know if you give it a try - I would love to see other versions.