About the Project as a Team
This poster campaign was designed for my DES 16 class in Spring 2018 for a real social movement that my team and I found on Facebook. My slogan #MaternityMatters was chosen to represent the entire team's campaign. We abided by the original organization's color palette: orange, white, and dark gray. The goal of these class projects was for each team member to create one poster in Illustrator and another poster in Photoshop.
About March for Moms
March for Moms is an official organization that campaigns to march for maternal rights. Their website can be found here. Support them and their cause if you can!
My Individual Design Process for Each Poster
In both designs, I had to come up with at least 3 different iterations each. I decided to make one design using illustrations to visually communicate my message, another design using only typography to literally communicate my message, and the third design using a combination of both illustration and typography to communicate my entire concept.
In the first poster, my class and I had to use Adobe Illustrator to come up with a poster design (18"x24"). While everyone went with an illustration to depict their concept, I was the only one who decided to use typography to stand out from the rest. To my surprise, my professor wanted to include this in his teaching portfolio to exemplify what kind of work he taught his students in his first year of teaching.
"March for the Future" is an additional slogan that I used in my poster designs to powerfully imply that by saving mothers, people would also be saving babies. Babies are usually called "the next generation of leaders under the proper parental guidance," so by saving mothers people will be able to work towards a great future.
With the idea of a "better tomorrow" in mind, I combined a symbolic sunset with a photoshopped silhouette of a group of protesters that I found on a Google Images search for my second poster. I outlined the borders of the poster with the sunset image instead of leaving it white like the rest of the canvas because I wanted the brilliant border to symbolize that the fight is infinitely ongoing, and the possibilities are endless. I also chose this particular sunset image to photoshop into this design because it was orange. Other image results showed red, or pink sunsets. This one was purely orange, which I thought matched the organization's branding colors the best.
In both poster designs, I spaced out words to make an impression on viewers that this is important to think about. I also design this poster with as little words as possible to make the consumption of information easily identifiable, especially through sectioning.
Why is this campaign design so special to me?
This was my first time applying graphic design to real life. While I didn't really expect much out of this project-- or even this class, since I was trying to get into fashion design at the time-- I was surprised to receive such high praise for my design project. To see my work be well received while also knowing the feelings of pleasure that I had thinking of the design strategy and assembling the designs on the Adobe programs, I felt that I had a whole new potential to dive deep into and bring above the surface level to make true impact that could actually be seen in the world as real.
To summarize, these poster designs are special to me because they were the first graphic design projects I ever had, and I did exceedingly well with them solely based on my creativity, research, and intuition.