"When you make something no one hates, no one loves it." - Tibor Kalman 

Assignment: Design a poster with global, critical socio-political content that stimulates emotions, provokes dialogue and rouses an audience to support/engage in an issue or event, cause or mission. (In other words: Take a stand and make other people shit too.) Then design an exhibition which not only displays your final outcome, but also communicates your process - from inspiration to implementation. 

Choose a political or social issue to take a stance with via a poster.

I chose to take a stand on women's rights. As a woman, it's something I definitely feel slightly passionate about. Seeing Facebook stories about girls getting sent home from school for ridiculous uniform violations, the wage gap, and rape culture make me upset.

Take a step back and compile all the research gathered and make sense of it, then draw conclusions/stances.

My professor had us preform this mind mapping exercise where we took phrases or quotes from our research and try to organize it, by finding connections or over reaching categories. 

1. Reproductive rights is an issues and birth control is a sub-issue within that

2. It's a chain sexism leads to rape culture, rape culture leads to the need for reproductive rights, reproductive rights leads to the debate of abortion, the debate of abortion leads to the need for birth control

3. Women's bodies should not be a political matter

4. Women should decide the fate of women

5. Birth control empowers women

6. Trump is sexist and that's a problem

7. Pro-child, pro-family, pro-choice

Make sketches of poster ideas based on stances created by defining.

Create drafts of most profound sketches for review and critique. Go through this step many times to reach the most successful solution.

After having meetings with classmates and my professor, the sketches with little stars were the ones that I pushed forward into the first drafts. These versions were mostly blowing up my sketches into a bigger size and experimenting with different mediums such as ink or illustrator.

These versions were to create better illustrations of the concepts my classmates responded to in draft one. For the Trump quotes I realized that it was difficult to be as impactful and offensive without the context of it being a quote.

For how birth control empowers women, I tried to make it less about the medical side and how the empowerment feels. While this is a positive message, it wasn't as powerful as some of the other messages.

For stop targeting women I changed the target from a shooting range target to a more traditional target, fleshed out a woman's body a little better and tried to incorporate the word "stop" to make the message more obvious. This concept received the most response from my classmates, so I made the executive decision to stop focusing on other concepts and only work on this one.

These versions were mostly explorations of what I could do in a photoshoot. The main goal was to incorporate the "stop" into the image better - the black bar was too much of a censored, un- rated movie vibe which is the opposite message I was going for.

The photoshoot went well. My classmates responded the most to the the "stop" and the target painted on the body. There was however, an issue with the model's areolas being in too much competition with the target. The steps I took to turn this image into the final was the crop the nipples out and shift the "s" down, and create a darker mood for the photo - almost as if the body was being laid out at the morge. 

Print poster at 36" by 48" and hang in exhibition.

Stop targeting womens' bodies! Especially their reproductive rights, that shouldn’t
even be a political discussion. Campaigns shouldn’t be based on infringing on
a woman’s power of choice to do what she wants with her body. It’s even more
disturbing that the majority of the politicians so focused on making these decisions
are men, and have never been, and will never be pregnant. If Viagra can be
government funded so can birth control and planned parenthood. Women deserve
just as much control as men over their reproductive rights.