Week 4.1

In Class

In today's class we had a small critique of everyone's posters. I had printed out the tampon sandwich poster as this is the one that most people, including Andre liked the most last week.

To expand on the idea of adding sanitary products to food I did a quick brainstorm of other foods I could use for this. I came up with hot chips, carrots, popsicles, ice creams, pizza, and takeaway fizzy drinks. I also came up with a few variations on the title. 'A choice no one should have to make', 'periods are not a choice', and 'an impossible choice, period.'

I began working on the idea of the packet of hot chips with a tampon in them. I sourced my image from Unsplash like usual. 

Photo by Miguel Andrade on Unsplash

In photoshop I quickly masked everything from the image except for the packet of chips. I added a few adjustments to this to make it less orange, and more distorted (I used posterize for this). On top of the image I drew a tampon, to make it look like it was in the packet of chips too. I exported to InDesign to start putting text onto the poster.

Here I added in some red paint speckles for some texture.

Playing with the colours to try to make the tampon stand out more.

Same title as the previous poster.

Paint specks and new title.

Blue colours and different title placement. Here I was struggling to think of any new ideas, then I remembered the lecture this morning about how one of the people had modelled their poster on an old cigarettes ad. I decided to see if any of the McDonalds ads would give me any inspiration.

This poster did actually inspire me with the red background, and white lower case text which was centered above the image. I also tried to do the gradient background but couldn't get this bit right so gave up.

Red background and shadow.

Changing the position of the shadow to correspond better with the highlights and shadows of the original image.

Trying different text placement.

Coming up with a more catchy title and adding in the other text. This is the poster I submitted.

The rest of the posters are just me playing around with different ways of having the title.

Another Concept

I had the idea of making a poster more interesting by creating some text/images/marks away from the computer. To begin with I painted a tampon black and tried to make a stamp out of this on a piece of paper. This didn't really work as I envisioned it, but I still liked the outcome.

I still wanted to create the outline or shape of a tampon with paint so I did this just with a paintbrush and very few brushstrokes. Again I liked the outcome.

One more thing I wanted to do with my paint was to write the title/heading in my own handwriting. I tried this out using my normal handwriting, and then again using a more fluid, loose style of writing.

This was the loose handwriting.

This is my normal handwriting, just with paint not ink.

I also got out my alphabet stamps and wrote the title in stamps and ink just in case it looked cool, and worked with my poster. I wasn't so sure about this, but I thought I might as well try it.

After I did all this mark making, I then moved onto photography. I had some newsprint paper lying around that I knew would work for my idea of making it look like fish and chips. I scrunched this up and then took a photo with my camera.

In photoshop I selected just the paper, then distorted the image to make it look more interesting. I also drew some chips onto the paper. At this point I really hadn't thought much about what I wanted them to look like in the end, I just wanted to get my idea out there.

This was all I got in indesign on this day. I wasn't feeling very creatively inspired but I decided to leave it here rather than pushing for something that I could tell wasn't going to happen easily today.