Assignment 4: Save, Prevent, Kill...

This assignment involved the designing of a poster with the general public as the target audience. I thought about a few themes like Child Abuse and Hunger but finally settled on something which frustrates me almost daily when travelling on public transportations.

Taking note that the poster must be able to capture attention and put across a message at a glance, I decided to adopt a simple design. Hence, I made use of stick figures in my illustration.
In the illustration, 2 forms of drawing were used, one being very clean lines when drawing the people and the handphone and sketchy lines when drawing the "noise" to make it look out of place and to illustrate just how "off" it is to be there. The person on the right was also intentionally cut off to show him being "forced" out of the scene due to the noise.

For the fonts for the heading and subheading, "Lucida Console" was used. Although it may look a little informal, it was intentionally used as this message is being communicated more towards the younger generation who are the contributors of the "noise". In addition, a similar font was used by a previous campaign of anti-piracy and the tagline was "File Sharing" which was highly focused on music and videos. Hence, by using a similar font, it is somewhat a parody to highlight another context of music "sharing".

For the main text or copy, it talks to the audience by addressing them directly. There is a little sarcasm used as the whole poster adopts a more sarcastic kind of tone. Arial font is used in here as it is easier for reading especially if it is a little wordy.

Stop blasting your music on public transportations.

We would rather listen to the rusty engines of the bus

and random honks from cars.

Be considerate to the sleep-deprived

and help create a peaceful resting environment.

I ended up with 2 colour schemes of the poster as I can't decide on which one would look better. However, after a consultation session, it was decided that my original poster of World Food Programme can better convey the message. Hence, some editing was done.

From this assignment, I took away a valuable lesson with me. That is to say that something which makes sense to me may not be that easily understood by others. This is especially so if I am the creator of a visual representation. By creating something, it means that I have already pre-defined its meaning which may not be easily understood when seen by others who are totally new to it.

In a poster, there must be a strong graphic element to capture the attention of passer-bys. If the graphic is unable to do so or is not easily understood, the audience may not stop to notice the other elements of the poster. Besides the graphic, the heading which is made up of the largest words on the whole poster, must be able to have a hold on the audience, relate to them and make them want to find out more about what the poster is actually about. This is when the cover will come into play, to provide more information about the poster. On the whole, the poster must be able to create an impact on the audience.