Designing for Charity.

I spent today at Action for Family Carers, a local charity providing support and information to unpaid carers. I've signed up as an admin volunteer, but I will mainly be designing posters and such for events and advertising.

On December 3rd is the 'Make Maldon Magical' christmas fair, and AfFC have a stall there. They asked me to design three posters, one for each of the fundraising activities; a tombola, face painting and balloon modelling. I took my macbook along to their offices; they only have PCs with no design software and I couldn't cope with that! Haha anything I did had to be able to be transferred to Microsoft Word though, so I used Adobe Illustrator to design the graphics, then laid it out in Word (I'd have preferred to use InDesign, but say if they want to use the same design next year but just update a few things, they wouldn't be able to do that if I'd only done it in InDesign, and I like to cater to their needs :) )

So I had this idea to use stars, in the shape of a christmas tree (well half a christmas tree anyway!) so as well as being unique to each activity, there would be a recurring theme throughout and it would be slightly christmassy. These are the first couple of ideas:

The three posters will be displayed all in a row so I was thinking they could be designed so that when they're next to each other they'll make a whole christmas tree between two of the posters, but I have no way to guarantee which order they'll be put on the display boards, and the stars probably wouldn't line up too well either. 

Another idea in development for the ballon modelling poster, a christmas tree made from balloons:

(I'm very proud of this! Designed in Illustrator)

Everything in this post is in development, so please excuse the unfinished designs!