Introduction: Hello! Our names are Jake Leroux and Ryan Vanderwey. We are both freshmen at Brophy College Prep in Phoenix. We are both pretty new at photoshop but we are picking it up quickly. Our school is hosting the 2018 summit on human dignity to address the commodification of the human person. For about two weeks our school will be focusing on these issues through classroom activities including this portrait poster project we were assigned in Graphic Design. This project has to be a portrait with an uplifting and hopeful message rather than the peril and hopelessness that we commonly see with human trafficking posters. Even though Ryan and I are both abecedarians with this type of organized graphic design we were excited to express our views on this topic by sharing our designs. Creating a lighthearted poster for a topic such as human trafficking can be quite an incendiary process so we tried to keep the colors vibrant while using a bold Russian constructivist style. We had a lot of fun working on these posters and hope you enjoy them!
Inspiration: At first Ryan and I had many varying, eclectic ideas and creative differences but eventually we decided on creating a contemporary Russian constructivist style much like Shepard Fairey or Ernesto Yerena. We decided on this because it can convey a bold opinion or idea in an effectual way. This made us excited to express our views and ideas on this topic through our design. Our inspiration really influenced our ideation on these posters...
Ideation: We began brainstorming possible ideas for our design knowing that we weren't going to conform to the overwhelmingly mainstreamed human trafficking poster trends like barcodes and handcuffs. We decided to go with a more uplifting design to show that all people have dignity. We decided to go with vibrant, bright, contrasting colors as opposed to dark homogeneous grays because we wanted to give hope to everyone too afraid to approach this umbrageous topic. We wanted to have a detailed foreground, solid or boring background, and a bold type, so people could quickly glance at the poster and still see the main point of it. After discussing and conceptualizing the layout for this poster we began sketching roughs.
Sketches Roughs and Notes: Once we had discussed our ideas we began to sketch all of our possible layouts onto paper and began conceptualizing some rough drafts. We illustrated the portrait in a constructivist style by posterizing the basic image in our sketches. Then we added some basic text in any of the blank space that we had (mostly it was the top, bottom or sides.) This seemed like it would be very effective because then the text would be the main focus of the image. After going through the variety of sketches and roughs that we had, Ryan and I started to design the digital comps on Adobe Photoshop in our computers.
Digital Process: The way I began designing my posters was finding a good portrait image to use from Un-splash. the main thing that I was looking for in a portrait was a front faces person with a straight face. Once I put this image in Photoshop I used the Quick selection tool to select the person so I could separate them from the background image. I right clicked it then clicked select and mask. I turned up the contrast, radius and smoothness and turned down the shift edge. Then I put a gaussian blur on the image and typed Ctl-Shift-U which made the image black and white so I could accurately judge the contrast. After that I went to image-posterize which made the acclivity of contrasting tones on many Russian constructivist posters. Then I added a gradient to the image and a solid background. The last thing was to add a short and bold text. On Ryan's images he also used the quick selection tool to separate the person from the background. He then copied the quick selected image to a blank canvas. the rectangle tool was used to make many of the constructivist lines and designs that you can see in his pictures. then just like my comps the last thing to do was add the text.
Digital Compositions: These comp designs were created using portrait pictures found on Unsplash, which we edited using Adobe Photoshop...
Critique: Throughout the process of finishing this project poster Ryan and I both received a lot of good and bad criticism from each other, other groups, and our instructor Mr. Davis. Most of the criticism had to do with how the old dude in the posters doesn't have do with human trafficking. According to many of the presentations during this summit anyone can be used as a modern day slave, which is the message we are trying to convey. Another criticism had to do with the Jurassic Park styled typeface in one of the comps which we decided to change (even though that is a great film series.) Also I received some critique on the 'Look Up; Listen Up' text layout on the second comp which I eventually changed.
Final Poster: We eventually decided to go with this final poster...
Pitch: In our final design we wanted to convey that anyone can be affected by human trafficking and and everyone who is, still has dignity. We didn't want to design one of the stereotypical dark human trafficking posters with handcuffs and barcodes, but instead we decided to design a more uplifting and hopeful poster. We used Adobe photoshop to display that the commodification of the human person is modern day slavery. Our poster expresses that all people have dignity and deserve respect.
