The Influence of Thought-provoking Posters on People

Critical Writing

A social semiotics poster is a poster that is thought provoking for the viewer. The subject of the poster can be any major or minor problem that we see going on in the society. The assignment that I was given was not allowed to have any words in the poster, which made it a little more difficult to make sure that the message came across to the viewer. There were four objectives for this project. First, was to explore ideation, gestalt, and semiotic principles using images. Second, to communicate a point of view. Third, was to use the concepts of semiotics to edit and rearrange an image to communicate a message. Finally, fourth, to experiment with a poster format. We could either draw out our poster or create one online our computers. The final idea for my project took almost the entire two weeks that we had to work on the project.

I started off just writing a list of what kind of poster I wanted to create. I wanted it to be memorable and hard to look at because it was so emotional. Then, I started just doing research. I searched up social issues in today's society on google and wrote all those that seemed interesting to do. I also looked at images to brainstorm off of. I ended up having at least ten topics I could base my project off of. I started coming up with ideas for all ten in my head and marking off which ones wouldn’t really work for me, until I had only a few more topics to work with. Some of the topics I was leaning towards were: Homeless veterans and the housing of refugees, an educator's low salary, hunger, suicide, and cyberbullying. I sketched out ideas for each of them, on paper, then I sat back and determined which would be the strongest design, and met what kind of poster I wanted to make. None of the sketched were exactly standing out to me or reaching my expectations. However, as I was looking at the suicide and cyberbullying sketches, I realized I could link them together into one piece. I re-evaluated the two topics and sketched the two ideas into one. At first, my sketch just had a small laptop with the power cord hanging down and it was tied around a human's neck. Not only did it represent that cyberbullying could still kill, but also that internet and technology can take over our lives.

As I started to create the poster online, I used an online painting software called Sumo Paint. Even with my drawing tablet, it was extremely hard to use. I constantly had to restart. Finally, after consulting my instructor, he pointed out that my design was a little too simple. He suggested that I change the type of computer from the laptop to an old boxy monitor, and not only have the monitor, but a keyboard and mouse as well. Then, I realized, that not only would it make the composition of the poster better, but a boxy computer would be easier to create rather than the smoothed edges of a laptop. After, working on that for a while, I had everything drawn out except the body. I wanted to create the body to look pixelated, but one of my peers couldn’t tell what it was and suggested that i change the position of the body. After I did that, I liked it a whole lot better without the pixels. It still seemed a little bland, however, and after so thought, I added the colors of the social media apps into the different parts of the computer and text message bubbles around the background. I was still having a lot of problems with the software I was using, so I finally manned up and bought photoshop to fix all of the problems that I had creating the poster. Then I was able to create a background with the ellipses that appear when someone is texting you back. Then my poster was done.

A lot of my ideation solely came from my peers and my instructor as I was working on my poster. I started out with a simple “Blah” design and ended up with an intricate design that met all of the requirements that I made for myself. On top of learning new ideation techniques, I was able to learn not just one, but two new editing/painting softwares. This project really helped me understand gestalt and semiotic principles, and I really enjoyed the outcome.