Activity 3.2 - Sunflower Haiku

My inspiration for this haiku has been the fields of sunflowers in the South of France. They are glorious for several months. On returning from a 6-week trip I had expected them to have faded but I was surprised to find the once golden fields to be almost blackened, as if a fire had been through.

The Font: Having cloned the haiku and tried a dozen or so candidate fonts including some I downloaded and installed. I selected Sand 16pt. as it has the organic look I was after, suggesting nature and change as well as sufficient weight allowing it to stand out from the background. I intend to place it over a photo so it will need strength. I set the colour to black as should look good against a background I will use for the animation. It is a system font common to PC and Mac so appropriate if I later choose to use it in supporting text as well as in the GIF and, I am hoping (?), more amenable to resizing the graphic should that prove necessary when fine tuning. I set the paragraph spacing to 5 pt. to give the lines some separation and after further experimentation settled on centre alignment for symmetry.

I used SnapNDrag to capture the screen section and pasted into Photoshop (PS) for processing as a GIF. It came down to 16k. which seemed reasonable. Probably could have got it smaller if necessary. Border applied in DW.

What I have learned: The font worked well against the backgrounds. It breaks up quickly if resized though some PS voodoo may have lessened this. Nevertheless, important to be exact about the size needed before converting text to image.