Make a Screen-Print Style Data Visualization Poster

Open Lopsy. In the New Document dialog, set Width to 1500 and Height to 2000 pixels, keep the White background and click Create. That's a 3:4 portrait, which prints well at 18 × 24 inches.

Select Background, set the foreground colour to #F3EDE0 and choose Edit → Fill. Give the paper a little tooth with Filter → Add Noise…: Amount 4, Mono.

Now add four guides. Each one is a single click on a ruler:

• Click the top ruler at 60 and 1440. These are the side margins.
• Click the left ruler at 420 and 1900. These are the top and bottom of the blue panel.

Each ink gets its own group in the Layers panel, called a plate. Select Layer 1, click New Group at the bottom of the Layers panel and rename the group Blue Plate. With Blue Plate selected, click Add Layer. The new layer lands inside the group. Rename it Flood. You can delete the empty Layer 1 now.

Pick the Rectangular Marquee and drag from the top-left guide crossing to the bottom-right one. With Snap to Guides on (it is by default), the marquee locks onto the guides. Set the foreground to #2B35A8, choose Edit → Fill, and then, with the selection still active, run Add Noise… at Amount 6, Mono. The noise gives the ink a fine grain. Press Cmd+D to deselect.

This is where the data comes in. To make an egg's area proportional to its weight, its radius has to grow with the square root of the weight. With the ostrich egg at a radius of 350 px, each egg's radius is 350 × √(weight ÷ 1400):

• Quail 28 px, pigeon 39, chicken 71, duck 78
• Turkey 84, goose 113, emu 229, ostrich 350

Select Blue Plate, add a layer and name it Whites. A fried egg white isn't a circle, so build each one from several overlapping circles:

1. With the Elliptical Marquee, hold Cmd (Ctrl) to keep the shape a circle and drag a main circle about 1.7 times the egg's radius across. That works out to roughly 48 px for the quail, 66 for the pigeon, 121 for the chicken, 133 for the duck, 143 for the turkey, 192 for the goose, 389 for the emu and 595 for the ostrich.
2. Hold Shift as well and drag five or six smaller circles around its rim, each about 0.6–0.9 times the radius across. Let some poke out and some stay tucked in. Shift adds each one to the selection.

Lay the eggs out like this:

• The six small eggs go in a row near the top of the panel, smallest on the left. Line up their bottoms, about 280 px below the top of the panel, not their centres.
• The emu goes on the left, about a third of the way down the panel.
• The ostrich goes at the bottom right.

Leave the bottom-left corner and the space right of the emu free for labels.

Where two circles meet there's a sharp notch. Choose Select → Grow… and enter 20, then Select → Shrink… by the same 20. Growing fills the notches, and shrinking brings the outline back to its original size, so the selection keeps its lobes but loses the sharp corners. Because the shape barely changes size, the areas stay close to the data.

Set the foreground to the paper colour #F3EDE0 and choose Edit → Fill.

A 20 px rounding is right for the small eggs but too subtle on the giants. Cmd-click the Whites thumbnail to select everything on the layer. Then, with the Rectangular Marquee, hold Shift+Alt and drag a box around the emu and the ostrich. Shift+Alt intersects, so only the two big eggs stay selected.

Now Grow by 45 and Shrink by 45, then Edit → Fill again. Doing this separately keeps the small eggs from merging into each other: a 45 px grow would bridge the gaps between them.

The poster's punchline is that one ostrich egg weighs as much as 24 hen's eggs (1,400 ÷ 58 ≈ 24), so draw that as a little 6 × 4 grid of icons.

Select the Brush, open the brush presets and go to the Shape tab. Choose Hard Round and set Size 44, Hardness 100, Opacity 100 and Spacing 136. Spacing is a percentage of the size, so the dabs land 44 × 1.36 ≈ 60 px apart.

On the Whites layer, still painting in the paper colour, click once in the bottom-left corner of the panel, about 80 px in from the left edge and about 260 px above the bottom of the panel. Then Shift-click 300 px to the right. The brush draws a straight line from the first click to the second, and the spacing turns it into exactly six dots. Repeat for three more rows, each 60 px lower.

You can't print cream over blue, so the whites have to be holes in the blue ink. Cmd-click the Whites thumbnail, select Flood, and press Delete. Then hide Whites with its eye icon. The eggs now show the bare paper, grain and all. Keep the Whites layer, because you'll load its outline several more times.

Collapse Blue Plate with its arrow, select it, and click New Group. Name it Yellow Plate. Collapse that, select it, and make one more group called Pink Plate. Collapsing the selected group first makes each new group a sibling instead of nesting it inside.

Select Yellow Plate, open its effects drawer with the button on its row, and set Blend to Multiply. Do the same for Pink Plate. Now wherever yellow or pink lands on another ink, it darkens it the way real transparent ink does.

Select Pink Plate and add a layer named Egg Shadows. Cmd-click the Whites thumbnail (expand Blue Plate to reach it), select Egg Shadows, set the foreground to #FF4F8B and choose Edit → Fill. Deselect.

With the Move tool, press Shift+→ and Shift+↓ once each. Shift makes the arrow keys move 10 px, so the pink shifts 10 px down and to the right. Then Cmd-click Whites again, select Egg Shadows and press Delete. Only a thin crescent of pink is left, just outside each egg. Because the plate multiplies, pink over blue prints a dark violet, which reads as a shadow.

Select Yellow Plate and add a layer named Yolks. Choose the Shape tool, set Shape to Ellipse and Output to Pixels. Click the Fill swatch and type FFC21A into its hex field. If a stroke swatch is showing, click it and choose Remove stroke.

Instead of dragging, click where a yolk should go. A click opens the Shape Size dialog, where you can type an exact width and height. The shape is centred on the spot you clicked. Make each yolk about 80% of its egg's radius across, set a little off-centre the way a real yolk slides:

• Quail 22, pigeon 31, chicken 57, duck 63
• Turkey 67, goose 90, emu 183, ostrich 280

The 24 icons need yolks too, and Shrink can make all of them at once. Cmd-click Whites, then hold Shift+Alt and drag a rectangle around just the grid to keep only the 24 dots. Select → Shrink… by 13 turns each 44 px dot into an 18 px circle, centred where the dot was.

Select Yolks, set the foreground to #FFC21A, choose Edit → Fill and deselect.

Real yolks are domes, so give them a shaded edge on the lower right. First you'll make a black-and-white map of the shading, then turn it into halftone dots.

Select Egg Shadows in the Pink Plate and add a layer named Yolk Shade. Cmd-click Yolks, set the foreground to black and Edit → Fill. The yolks turn black.

Now cut the black back to a crescent. Set the foreground to white. Cmd-click Yolks again, then with the Rectangular Marquee Shift+Alt-drag a box around the chicken, duck, turkey and goose to keep just those four. With the marquee tool still active, tap ← and ↑ to slide the selection outline about 7 px up and to the left. Select Yolk Shade and Edit → Fill. White covers everything except a crescent at the lower right.

Repeat for the ostrich and the emu, nudging the selection about 20 px this time, so the bigger yolks get thicker crescents. The quail, pigeon and hen yolks stay solid black for now. You'll deal with them in the next two steps.

The white areas are invisible on the poster because white multiplied by anything changes nothing.

With Yolk Shade selected, run Filter → Gaussian Blur… with a radius of 7 to soften the crescents into a gradient. Then choose Filter → Halftone… and set Dot Size 6, Angle 45 and Softness 0.5, and leave Density at 1. Turn on Preview to check the dots, then Apply. Dense black becomes big dots and the fade becomes small ones. White areas become transparent.

The blur spread the dots a little past the yolks, so trim them: Cmd-click Yolks, choose Select → Inverse, select Yolk Shade and press Delete. Then drag a marquee around the 24-egg grid and press Delete again, so those icons stay clean.

The two smallest yolks are only a few dots wide, so give them a solid crescent instead. Set the foreground to black. Cmd-click Yolks, Shift+Alt-drag a box around just the quail and pigeon, and Edit → Fill on Yolk Shade. Then nudge the selection outline about 4 px up and to the left with the arrow keys and press Delete. A thin black crescent remains on each.

Now open the effects drawer for Yolk Shade, enable Color Overlay and set it to #FF4F8B. Every dot turns pink, and because the Pink Plate multiplies, pink on yellow prints a hot orange-red.

A wet yolk catches the light. With the Elliptical Marquee, Cmd-drag a small circle on the upper left of the chicken's yolk, about a third of the yolk's radius across. Then Cmd+Shift-drag a tiny one just above and to the right of it. Do the same on the duck, turkey, goose, emu and ostrich yolks, adding to the selection each time.

Select Yolks and press Delete. The highlights are holes in the yellow ink, so they show the paper, just like the whites.

Select Yolk Shade so the headline lands in the Pink Plate. Choose the Text tool, pick Bowlby One, set Size to 170 and the colour to #FF4F8B, then click in the top margin and type JUMBO YOLKS. Press Tab to commit.

Switch to the Move tool and drag the headline so its left edge sits on the left guide, a little below the top margin. At 170 px it runs almost exactly from guide to guide, which makes the page feel deliberate.

Turn the two O's into eggs. Select the headline layer, choose the Magic Wand with Contiguous on, and click inside the first O. Shift-click inside the second O to add it. Then Select → Grow… by 6, so the yellow will tuck under the pink letter.

Expand Yellow Plate, select Yolks, add a layer named Title Yolks, set the foreground to #FFC21A and choose Edit → Fill. Where the grown yellow overlaps the pink letter, the overprint makes a thin orange-red rim. Printers call that overlap a trap.

Cmd-click the headline's thumbnail, expand Blue Plate, select Flood and add a layer named Title Shadow. Set the foreground to #2B35A8, choose Edit → Fill and deselect. With the Move tool, nudge the layer about 9 px down and to the right with the arrow keys.

If you left it there, the pink would print over the blue and the headline would turn a muddy violet. Knock the letters out of the shadow: Cmd-click the headline thumbnail again, select Title Shadow and press Delete. Then Cmd-click Title Yolks and delete that too. Now only the blue offset shows, and the pink stays pink.

Labels print in opaque ink, so they sit on top of everything. Strictly, a printer would knock these out of the blue too. Keeping the type opaque and on top means it stays editable, and at this size nobody can tell. Collapse the three plates, select Pink Plate, click New Group and name it Type. Select Type and add a layer called Leaders to hold the lines you'll draw later.

With Leaders selected, set the text to Courier Prime, weight Bold, size 24, colour #F3EDE0. Type each bird's name in capitals. Make the weights in Alfa Slab One at size 34 in #FFC21A, for example 9 g.

Centre each name under its egg, about 45 px below the row's common bottom line, and each weight just below its name. Use the Move tool, with the arrow keys for the last few pixels. Because the eggs share a bottom line, every label sits the same distance from its egg.

The two giants get bigger labels: the name in Courier Prime Bold at 34, the weight in Alfa Slab One at 84.

• Put EMU and 600 g in the open blue to the right of the emu.
• Put OSTRICH and 1,400 g at the left edge of the panel, under the emu and above the grid. Set = 24 HEN'S EGGS in Courier Prime Bold at 24 just above the grid.

Each big label needs a line pointing at its egg. Select Leaders, choose the Pencil, set Size to 3 and the colour to the paper cream. Click just left of 600 g, level with the middle of the number, then Shift-click on the emu's edge to draw a straight line. Do the same from the end of 1,400 g to the ostrich's edge. Finish each line with a single click of the Brush at size 14 right on the egg's edge. The dot shows exactly which egg the label belongs to.

A bubble chart needs a key showing what a size means. Select Leaders and click Add Layer, then name the new layer Legend. Choose the Shape tool, click the Fill swatch and choose Remove fill, then add a stroke in #F3EDE0 with Width 3.

Use the same formula as the eggs: 100 g is 187 px across, 50 g is 132 px and 10 g is 59 px. Click to create each ring with the Shape Size dialog, placing their centres so all three rings share one bottom edge, in the open blue under the goose, to the right of the emu label.

With the Pencil at size 2, click at the top of each ring, then Shift-click about 200 px to its left to draw a straight line. Then add the labels 100 g, 50 g and 10 g in Courier Prime Bold at 22, right-aligned at the end of each line. Centre the heading AREA = WEIGHT in Courier Prime Bold at 22 above the legend, with clear space between it and the row of weights above.

The small print is part of the blue plate. Select Title Shadow and set Courier Prime in #2B35A8:

• THE GREAT EGG CENSUS (Bold, 26) flush with the left guide near the top edge, and PLATE NO. 7 flush with the right guide on the same line.
• How much does an egg weigh? (Regular, 40) on the left, halfway between the headline and the panel.
• Typical whole-egg weights, rounded. Each white's area is proportional to weight. (Regular, 22) in the bottom margin, under the panel.

The footnote matters: a data poster should say where its numbers come from and how to read them.

Flat digital blue looks like a screen, not ink. Two layers fix it, both in Blue Plate, directly above Flood:

1. Uneven ink. Select Flood, click Add Layer and name the new layer Ink Mottle. Run Filter → Clouds… with a Scale of 6. Set its blend mode to Multiply and its opacity to 10%. Then Cmd-click Flood, choose Select → Inverse and press Delete, so the clouds touch only the blue.
2. Pinholes. Add a layer named Pinholes, fill it with mid-grey #808080, and run Add Noise… at 100 Mono, then Gaussian Blur… at 1. Run Filter → Threshold… at about 176, so only a few specks of noise turn white. Set the layer's blend mode to Screen, which hides the black.

Real screens get pinholes near the edges of the stencil. Marquee the whole panel, Shrink the selection by 36 and press Delete to clear the middle. Then Cmd-click Flood, choose Select → Inverse and delete again. That leaves specks only on the blue, in a band along its edges.

Expand Pink Plate, select the headline and add a layer named Stamp. With the Shape tool, set the fill to #FF4F8B and remove the stroke, then click to create a 136 × 136 circle to the right of the subtitle. Switch to a cream 3 px stroke with no fill and click the same spot without moving the mouse for a 120 × 120 ring.

Type DRAWN, TO and SCALE as three separate text layers in Bowlby One at 24 in the paper colour, and centre them in the ring. Then select each word's layer in turn, from the bottom up, and choose Layer → Merge Down until they're all part of Stamp.

At 136 px the stamp crowds the panel. Draw a rectangular marquee just around it and switch to the Move tool. Hold Cmd and drag the bottom-right handle in toward the centre until the box is about 80% of its size. Cmd keeps the proportions.

Next, move the pointer just outside a corner until it shows the rotate cursor, and drag counter-clockwise about 12°. Press Enter to apply and Cmd+D to deselect. Nudge the stamp with the arrow keys until it sits in the paper margin, clear of both the headline above and the blue panel below.

Hand-pulled prints are signed and numbered in pencil. Select Legend and type 12/50 in Reenie Beanie at 48 in #5E5A55. Line it up with the right guide, sitting on the same baseline as the footnote. Click Rasterize Layer (the T button at the bottom of the Layers panel), then run Add Noise… at 35 Mono, so the grey picks up a graphite grain.

Last, knock the inks out of register, as if the screens shifted between passes. Select the Yellow Plate group and, with the Move tool, nudge it about 2 px right and 2 px up with the arrow keys. Select Pink Plate and nudge it about 2 px left and 3 px down. Now the pink shadows peek out on one side of each egg, the orange-red trap shows in the title's O's, and the halftone sits a hair off the yolks. Keep it to two or three pixels. Any more and it reads as a mistake rather than a print.

Save with File → Save Project, and export with File → Quick Export PNG.