Assignment 4: Type-Driven Posters
My primary objective for this assignment was to inform parents about the dangerous consequences of childhood obesity. Because a child’s diet is controlled mostly by their parents, I wanted my target demographic to be parents of young children and teenagers. This allowed me to utilize more mature content and set a more serious tone in order to get my message across to my audience. I wanted to instill a sense of urgency among parents to a subject matter that has potentially life-threatening consequences.
For my first poster, I wanted to incorporate a headline that would instantly shock my audience upon reading it. I decided to use “People with obesity die 9.4 years earlier.” In order to further emphasize the correlation between obesity and death, I arranged the words of the headline to form an image of a cross, and slightly reduced the opacity to give it a ghostly effect. I also affixed a background image of a cemetery and created a layer of smoke to give an impression of an eerie fog. All the elements combined create a centrally-themed, cohesive poster that “scares” the audience into thinking about the dire reality of the consequences of obesity.
For my second poster, I took a more subtle direction. I didn’t want the correlation between obesity and death to be blatantly obvious as the first. I posed the question “Would you let your kids eat this?” along with the image of a milk chocolate candy bar, which represents obesity. In other words, “If an obesity-causing food was labeled accordingly, would you feed it to your children?” Although eating a single candy bar will not cause obesity itself, the continual consumption of any food high in sugar or fat may potentially lead to obesity. The idea behind this approach was to make parents think twice about the foods that they are giving to their kids.
I did encounter a few challenges with this assignment. The posters had to be text-driven, which meant I wasn’t able to employ my usual method of incorporating a lot of graphic elements to convey my message. So my headline selection was even more crucial in making that initial impact with my audience in order to hook them in. The graphic elements had to also be carefully selected as not to overpower the headline, but to play a more complementary role within the hierarchy of the poster. Although I utilized two completely different approaches for my posters, I believe I was successful in conveying a single unified message of “Obesity Kills”.
