- Do you believe your stance clear within your poster? Defend your answer- image, fonts, color, composition, etc.
- From your initial thumbnail sketches to your hand drawn draft- Do you feel you were successful in re-creating your poster idea digitally? If not, do you like the new visual outcome?
- What were the changes you made from your first version to the last version of the poster? Explain why you made those changes?
- Looking over your rubric, which category do you think your project is strongest? Explain why. Which category do you feel the least confident? Explain why.
- What was the most challenging aspect of the project, conceptually?
- What was most challenging about the project, technically?
- I believe that my stance is clear within my poster. I was mainly trying to convey the destruction and devastation that results from constant violence and war. I think that the images that I chose was effectively able to demonstrate this- the crumbled building coupled with the red, fiery sky was my attempt at showing the aftermath of a battle or a bombing that seems to happen on a daily basis somewhere in the world. I also tried to use a text that would evoke destruction, or at the very least, some kind of decay. The harshness of the font "Stencil" seemed to appropriately fulfill this idea. I also tried to utilize a dark, sinister color scheme, trying to avoid bright colors like blue or green. Instead, I turned to a color palette consisting of reds, oranges, blacks, grays, and darker yellows, which are colors that are usually associated with violence and/or death.
- I don't think I was successful in recreating my thumbnail sketches, mainly because when I was drawing out my sketches, my idea was still in the prime stages of development. It wasn't until later on, when I started on my half-page sketches that I actually decided on my finalized idea. The second half page sketch that I did was the first one that actually resembles my final project in some way. In that case, I was successful in recreating my poster digitally, and am ultimately happy with the results.
- My poster idea underwent a lot of renovation and reconstruction. Initially, I wanted to focus on Islamophobia, and indeed that is what I wrote about in my "what's your stance?" blog post. But when I started my thumbnail sketches, I found that trying to convey how despicable Islamophobia is was a lot harder than I had originally thought. A lot of my ideas seemed repetitive or shallow, and I didn't feel as though I was accurately getting my point across. Eventually, my idea evolved into world peace, and eventually, anti-war. My train of thought went from- acceptance to we-are-all-human to fighting-is-pointless to war-is-pointless to hatred-will-just-lead-to-us-all-destroying-one-another. The latter idea was the one I finally settled on because I think that an overarching problem with Islamophobia and discrimination in general is that, we have become so focused on ostracizing one another and beating the other side that we have lost sight of what is important. Something that I wrote in one of my first brainstorms about the project was: "Our unwillingness to accept each other is what is preventing a lot of problems from being solved. The solution is not to turn to hatred and fear. Instead, the world population needs to band together, trying to solve other issues that exist in this world." I think this is one of the ideas that influenced a lot of my thinking, and is ultimately the one that shone through in my final product.
- Looking over the rubric, I find myself feeling most confident about the design. Photoshopping the main images of the building and the sky did not actually take me too long, but I did spend a while afterwards experimenting with different filters and "image trace" settings after I had placed the completed file in Illustrator. What consumed more of my time was, surprisingly, the text. It took me a very long time to decide on the font, placement, size, color, and orientation of the text. I had to make sure that the colors didn't clash, but looked similar enough that it blended in with the color spectrum of the poster as a whole. But I digress. Overall, I think I did a decent job in designing the poster and making sure that the layout made sense. I think the color and fonts were utilized in a meaningful way, and I certainly hope that my "Layout of components are arranged in the most effective way to create a hierarchy of information." On the other side of the spectrum, I am least confident about the concept. As I mentioned in my answer to question one, I do believe that my stance is clear, but I just hope that the way I conveyed it makes sense and is powerful enough that it makes an impact on those who see it.
- I talked a little bit about this is question three, but conceptually, I found it very challenging to translate my stance from words to visuals. I found that I couldn't think how I wanted to convey my stance or idea, resulting in my thumbnail sketches being text-heavy or only text. I actually considered changing my entire idea at one point because I simply did not see how I could make a poster from my concept. In short, my biggest challenge conceptually was figuring out how to effectively share my message visually.
- Even after completing this project, I cannot say that I really understand illustrator. Technically, figuring out how to edit pictures in Illustrator was definitely challenging. I didn't feel like I utilized all of the tools to their maximum capacity because I wasn't entirely sure what their function was. Navigating the program initially, and while completing the project, proved to be the most difficult aspect of this poster project.
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| A very early draft of my poster |
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| A color study of my poster |
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| The final result |
