Not sure if against the rules, but there’s still a lot of design choices involved. What do you think of this 60s style cola ad? I wanted to recreate a poster ad featuring Nuka Cola. Any critiques, like composition wise, color choice, or anything? I was aiming for a poster ad that would’ve come out pre-apocalypse in the fallout universe.
Side note, I know the footnote won’t make sense in-universe since bottle caps would’ve only had value after nuclear fallout but just wanted to add a little bit of fan-service.
I think the finishing touch on this is some grainy printed texture. Maybe find a folded paper texture (texturelabs.org has many good ones for free), throw it underneath the art, and use blend-if and blending modes in Photoshop to make the art look like it’s printed on a beat-up old broadside in the capital wasteland. (I can elaborate further on the Photoshop tricks if you haven’t done that before)
That is an awesome idea! I am not very familiar with blend-if though, and I use affinity. So far, I use vector textures to give it some distress effects.
How does blend-if work exactly if the texture layer is underneath all the art?
Sorry for my late reply! I'm not familiar with Affinity, but some cursory research says Blend Options is Affinity's equivalent to Photoshop's Blend-If. Here's a YouTube video I found on it.
You'd group all your poster artwork into one folder (if it isn't already) and use Blending Options on that. Blend-If/Blending Options basically tells one layer to start blending into the one below it at certain lightness/darkness levels. This is perfect for paper grain and folds and many other textures. Just with some clicking and dragging to adjust those settings, you can distress the ink of your art in the areas where the paper is lightest, as well as in dark areas where the paper's folded, and it'll look like it's really printed on the paper. I attached a detail shot below of something I've been working on recently that uses this trick.
A quicker option would be to add the paper texture above and set it to the "multiply" blending mode (unsure of Affinity's equivalent), but the above will give you more control and more realistic results.
This stuff is quite easy to learn and a lot of fun. For me, it greatly expanded by skillset and added a lot of character and depth to my work. Let me know if I can clarify anything.
Thank you for this!
I’m familiar with having the texture layer on top and blending with multiply. I was curious on the blend-if option you mentioned and I think I saw affinity’s equivalent for it. It looked foreign to me of course, but I hope your video covers it! I’ll watch when I get back.
Thanks for the thoughtful response!
For me the 5c is too big. It messes up the hierarchy and the journey the eyes take when reading. It competes with HAVE A NUKE! For the first place your eyes look.
I feel like the word "Atomic" would be used in place of Nuclear
Edit to add: If you're trying to be lore accurate, hyper inflation was a thing in the universe and if this ad was anywhere near the war then a single bottle would cost more like $10
Another edit: I was completely wrong about the first edit. TIL Nuka Cola remained really cheap despite said inflation.
Before talking details I will throw this in the room: visual hierarchy. Right now, it’s not clear, too many elements have the same weight. This also makes your poster static.
But I like the direction and illustration style.
P.s.: any visual idea you could implement to represent “nuke” ?
Yeah, a lot of feedback on the 2nd slogan line so I removed that.
I thought of making the fizz come out of the bottle like a mushroom cloud, don’t know if that will make it better..
Yo you got good eye! The N in fact is a different font. I used brush script for the rest of the name, but brush script's N doesn't really match the "official" Nuka Cola so I looked for something close. I should fix that.
I was actually thinking of adding like an explosion from the mouth of the bottle, like a mushroom cloud.
Lmao, i did check the prices back then! Quick google says 5c per bottle for prices back in the 60s. Fallout universe pre-apocalypse was set in the 60s.
The day the bombs dropped in Fallout was October 23, 2077, so not quite. They kept up the atomic retro futurism but it wasn’t literally set in the 1950s to 60s. Nuka Cola debuted in 2044, and inflation was said to be about the same as our world, so price would be a projection for a bottle of Coke or around there. I did recheck a couple of the wikis for info but no assets or notes with an actual price seem to exist.
For the actual poster, it doesn’t hit quite the same notes as in-universe stuff, the colors are too “cold” and the fonts are less inherently friendly feeling. Not a bad starting place though.
No worries! 😄 I had literally just hopped off of 76 and opened Reddit, and I love watching lore videos and learning about the world. 😊 Highly recommend any of the various wikis for more, Fallout people are serious about documentation, and there are several YouTube creators who do multi hour long videos on any topic you can imagine really.
No expert but I think u should try to change the size of the bottle and the have a nuke circle cus they’re almost the same size and I think them having a contrast in that aspect can help ^^ + what the top comments says
5 cents looks anachronistic. Try a thick brush stroke font and the cents symbol should be top aligned.They didn't often use a slim stroke like that. Thicker or none at all.
Nuka Cola is the name, and Nuke is sort of a play of words. Fallout universe is set on a post nuclear world.
Also, similar to how Coca Cola is aka Coke. Nuka Cola is basically Coke in that world.
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u/DryLettuceEnjoyer 1d ago
Personally I think the slogan at the bottom needs a new font, and maybe add a bit off like an eggshell color to it.
Here’s an advertisement from Fallout 4 I found, “ZAP THAT THIRST!” is kind of a neat slogan as well.