What do you do as a designer when files get lost, corrupted, or destroyed and you need to make a change? That’s the story behind this portfolio piece. The original was created in 1999, three years before I started working at I.E. Productions. When Wada Farms asked us to revise the poster with updated logos, new information, and a higher resolution for a magazine, we went to the original project archive. This was all I could salvage from a wrecked hard drive:

As you may be able to tell, the image has been compressed and optimized for web. There’s all sorts of dithering going on and therefore the colors were just not right. The original had been sent to a newspaper, so the low resolution image was OK because of the half-toning, but this time it had to go to glossy for a magazine. To make matters worse, the fonts look OK, but the logo and photo were low resolution preview versions linked from the corrupted Quark XPress file. The originals had been corrupted on the only copy I could find!

Here’s what I had to work with. I was able to find the photos of the potatoes in another place. So I cut them out from their backgrounds and placed in the new layout.

Next, I found some wood to use for the door. I left the welcome mat as it was because it didn’t look too bad.
Then was the difficult part of fixing the woman’s legs. In Photoshop, I blurred, then smudged, then painted to try to get it close enough. It’s not super great, I’m sure many could do better. But it was good enough for a small magazine ad without looking too weird.