Poster Assignment (Week 5)

“Support Our Troops”

The concept of my poster is to take a traumatic image of a soldier’s return home in a casket to emotionally gain the attention of my cause. The objective is to promote awareness of our soldiers in Afghanistan and to provide them with support through the reality of what can happen. The quotes that were added into the poster are motivational quotes for people to reflect upon why our soldiers are there and to support the individual, brave troops currently in Afghanistan. My target audience is aimed at all of the Canadian citizens whose rights and freedoms are being defended by their soldiers overseas.

When starting with the initial image, I wanted to emphasis the casket, as that was the most important part of the poster. It is what gives the viewers the emotional touch and allows them to connect to the poster’s message. To emphasis this, I created a clone of the picture, allowing me to keep the colour of the casket, and grey scaling the rest of the background to provide a more gloomy, and depressing feel. To emphasis this even more, I decided to decrease the brightness of the image, which then allowed for a darker colour to come about in the image, especially underneath the casket. Additionally, I wanted to have the text stand out because there is an important message being expressed in the text. To do this, I slightly blurred the grey background and added a white and yellow text, which contrasts the grey colour of the background. The alignment of the text is different because I wanted the viewer to look closely at one text and allows it to be easily distinguished from each other. I wanted to space out the proximity of my poster’s elements to prevent clustering, allowing for an easy read.

Some problems that I encountered while creating my poster was trying to select the casket using the polygon lasso tool, especially around the area where the fingers of the casket barer. To achieve a better cut using the lasso tool, it was more accurate to zoom in and magnify the specific area of the cut. If there were further cuts that I needed to make, I would use the eraser tool to erase some parts of the casket layer so it would blend in accurately with the grey scale background. I also found it complicated to change something I had done at the very beginning. For example, I had made a few cuts to the image that I wanted to keep, but it was done near the very beginning of the image editing. Unfortunately, Fireworks’ history only can undo a certain number of steps before it is erased from the history.

I learned that Fireworks is a very powerful image editor and has many features that we have yet to learn. I feel that my piece met the original goal of my message, which was to increase awareness of our soldier’s sacrifices overseas and it can connect to its audience emotionally.