When i started to make the poster i was not really sure what to do with the background so a the time I had a simple blue gradient on it. When i wanted to put a better background i found a photo of water and put it into illustrator. After i rasterized it i turned the opacity down and had a blue box behind it to form a more interesting background image that was not too distracting. The background is my favorite part of the poster. I have never really done anything like that for a background before.
Another thing was withe the pictures. First i got them off the swim team website and then put them into illustrator. Once i realized that i need to do something so they blended a little better into the background and did not have such harsh edges. I opened the pictures into photoshop and there i used the blending tool. I selected the edge of one picture at a time and then contracted the selection. After i selected its inverse i used the blur tool to create smother edges. I also tried not to pick to many fonts or fonts that were hard to read, but i did want to have a little variation and that is why i put the records in different font.
