Project Poster Rationale | Mao

For this project, I chose Partners In Health (PIH) as my non-for-profit organization. PIH is a organization based in Boston, and holds many projects throughout the nation to provide medical relief for poor communities. This month, PIH has worked closely with BBB , a residential dorm that holds approximately 700 students. My goal was to make a poster supporting their “7 Day Haiti Challenge” in a distinct way. Given my audience--mostly freshmen and sophomores students, I wanted to create something that stood out amongst all the rest of the flyers (that never get read). What challenged me the most was to find a novel way to express notions of “heart, relief, and crises” in an event that already has many visual associations. After brainstorming possible concepts I put together what looks like a EKG reading with a two-sided heart to represent the Haitian heartbeat (from healthy to static). This idea struck me after looking at pictures of earthquake graphs, which looked very similar to that of an EKG. The visual I used was originally a candid shot of my Nigerian friend, which after many photoshop attempts looks like a very animated Haitian. This was my second challenge-- to design an effective illustration that framed my idea.

Following the principles of photography, I divided my poster into blocks of thirds. I believe this created an effective gestalt not only visually, but also typographically. To capture my audience at first glance I decided to use a little combination of pathos and logos. In my middle section, the message “50,000 Hearts Stopped on January 12, 2010” not only tells statistics, but also pulls a bit at the heart. In addition, I put this area on top of a grid (which I captured from Illustrator) to represent the graph of an EKG. The font family I chose for my entire poster was Warnock Pro, a serif font that came in 32 different weights. I found its variations of light, semi-bolds, bolds, and italics very useful depending on what kind of information I wanted to convey. I used the bold face for my first heading at 65pts. I wanted this to have the immediate “stop-dead-in-your-tract” effect. The rest of the information is in either bold, semi-bold, or regular weight. The color I chose is a plum red (C-15, M-100, Y-90, K-10) to contrast the black and repeat the redness of my heart visual. I arranged the content according to its hierarchical importance, as well as relevant groupings. One of the struggles was to reduce my information to its key components. It was a little difficult to find a way to communicate a succinct message while maintaining its visual aesthetics. Overall, I believe my design is very clean, readable, and appropriate for audiences of all ages.