Fake Social Media Post

Here are social media posts for a fictional restaurant, Void + Vinegar. Initially, I aimed for an analog vibe in most posts, but I became more experimental as I reached the final one. The pie picture is my favorite.

This was heavily inspired by a picture I took while in the army. I recreated all the elements using shapes, except for the barbed wire. The floating cube was also created with shapes, referencing a screenshot from a video game. I don't like gradients, so all my posts incorporate some form of dithering. For those unfamiliar with dithering, it's a technique for masking color banding by adding noise. In this case, I used Photoshop's default black-and-white noise with the blending mode set to overlay. I also applied a mask to manually adjust the transparency of the layer, which helped me make the dithering more uniform, especially with the varying banding sizes. 

    I had to make a collection of images for this post to achieve the desired look. I also included some images from my mood board, like the dotted noise from the plate and fork. The V+V logo resembles a pie, so I wanted it to be featured as the main dish. A plain-looking cherry pie with a single cherry on top. I tried using ChatGPT, but I disliked every image it generated. I ended up only using a single cherry it produced. I wanted this post to evoke the feel of old printed tech ads, so I used blue noise for the dither, which adds a nice softness. Three gradient maps were used to achieve the worn colors. The first is a soft overlay that blends some greens and cyans. The last two are set to color using V+V color palette. The pie features redder tones, while everything else incorporates grays, lightly mixed to avoid washing out all the colors completely.

    This post is kind of mid-and-rushed, mostly because I didn't have any ideas. But I didn't let that stop me. I wanted to focus only on the effect of this one, basing everything on digital corruption. (It felt like a cold, uncaring thing, I guess.) My best friend (Kelvin) has an old phone with a bunch of corrupted images. I extracted the noise and patterns, applying them lightly. I also used a Bayer matrix as the noise for the dither in this post. Messing more with the gradient maps to get a Y2k-era feel while retaining the V+V pallet's colors. I noticed a lot of the images I used as ref had randomly stretched areas being applied to the darker areas, so I did that with a slice of the midsection.

I treated this whole thing like a creative challenge. It helps me experiment and test things without feeling like work. When I showed these to my friends, they all seemed to agree that they could be album covers. I will see if I can find something for this weekend that aligns with this so I can keep doing more.

Here is a collection of the images and effects I used.