Fall 2014- Creative Art Direction- Project 4

Topics: |  Project 4  |  Subjects  |  Roughs  |  Refined  |  Results  |

Project 4- Human Rights Posters
Our 4th and last Creative Art Direction project was creating meant to use what we'd been learning all semester, by creating a 3-ad campaign, with the Declaration of the Common Rights of Humanity as our client. The only restriction was that we had to make a consistent ad campaign.

Subjects
To begin with, we had to do a lot of research. For my process, I went to the full list of 30 articles on the UN's website, and listed them off with short summaries. I then did a competition process of elimination between the 30, setting the rights against each other in terms of how interesting I found them to design. After half an hour and six rounds of going through, I decided on Article 4, Article 12, and Article 22.
They are as follows:
Article 4. No one shall be held in slavery or servitude; slavery and the slave trade shall be prohibited in all their forms.

Article 12. No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to attacks upon his honour and reputation. Everyone has the right to the protection of the law against such interference or attacks.

Article 22.  Everyone, as a member of society, has the right to social security and is entitled to realization, through national effort and international co-operation and in accordance with the organization and resources of each State, of the economic, social and cultural rights indispensable for his dignity and the free development of his personality.

For my initial poster designs, I decided that my concept was how blatantly we ignore the rights we're supposedly given as humans.

Rough Drafts

Click image any to enlarge

For Article 4, I knew I would have someone representing the slave wages many industries in the US force their workers to live with. I had Walmart specifically in mind when looking for graphics. The initial graphic, seen left, was what I came up with. The typesetting was, in a word, atrocious, but it was more for getting the idea out, at this stage.

For Article 12, I had a bit of a rougher time, as it was the vaguest of my three initial concepts. I knew I wanted to represent surveillance of some kind, and initially wanted to use CCTV cameras in some way, but found myself having a very hard time finding any that fit with the other two ad ideas, using humans, as well as having the ability to put good text to them. In the end, I decided to use the graphic to the right, again with terrible text just to get the initial idea out.

Lastly, the idea that immediately came up with on getting the project and the most time-consuming one, was Article 22, which I wanted to use a homeless person for. Finding a graphic for what I wanted was not happening, so finally, I decided to make one from scratch. Once I had a suitable photo selected, I proceeded to make the photographed person look dead, and covered the scene in snow and depression to get the point across.

Refined
 The first step to refine my design after I got everything laid out was to remove the backgrounds, which were inconsistent across the campaign and messed with any possible text, even if it had been laid out. I removed all three images' backgrounds, positioned them better on the page, and worked with the text to make it more of a focal point to the image, as it should have been.

Results
While the refined versions were significantly better than what I'd had, there was still much room for improvement. The text was kind of sloppy, wasn't really as bold as it could've been, and the whole layout was generally not good. I was a bit stuck on this, for a long time, but luckily, with some input from my instructor, I figured a way out of the rut.

The first step was fixing the text. Giving the headline contrast, using a dark red, and increasing the size, I made the text span the whole image. With that done, I went through and proceeded to change every line of text until it all followed suit, which also gave the text more contrast. I also changed the text from being pure black, which worked better when I dropped the graphics' opacities and made them a major part of the design.

As a last step, I designed a look for the Article numbers, again using the red. I think the final result came out fantastically.