home assignment 4: Prevent Teen suicides!

This week's assignment was to create a "save", "prevent", "kill" poster. I brainstormed a couple of ideas and grouped them according to:

1) Stop war/ stop violence/ stop abortion

2) stop anorexic children/ prevent teen depression/ stop teen suicides

3) Save water/ original works

I decided to focus on the theme of teens suicide because of the increasing coverage in the Newspaper about suicides of female celebrities like Anna Nicole Smith and Korean actress Jung Da Bin, and Singaporean students who slash their wrists. On top of that, the Dove campaign recently launched was also targeted towards giving young teens self confidence. Hence, I thought it would be timely to work on this theme.

Below are my brainstorming ideas:


Below is the first version of my work:

I included the principle of contrast by using a black to white colored gradient background. The color black and white represents death in different cultures.

I also placed the objects in a way that it has a balanced visual weight. The student on the right is balanced off by the text as well as the fallen chair. I added blood splashes onto the poster to show the morbidness and to represent a life lost. However, it was pointed out during tutorial that the blood spots were irrelevant to the hanging student since there will not be any bloodshed when one hangs himself or herself. Also, some commented that the head looked odd and seems to merge with the black gradient. It was actually my intention to show a censored face. Other comments were that the skin color of the student was weird and the white area at the noose was supposed to be black.

Hence, taking feedbacks into consideration, I improved the poster to version 2 as shown below:

I gave the student a decolorized skin, but a less yellowish one. Also, I changed the face color to match the skin color on the student's limbs and added hair to make it look less dummy-like. I deleted the blood splashes as it seems quite distracting and makes the poster look more complicated that it should. I changed the fonts of the poster to provide a more serious tone. I also resized the fonts as well to give the poster more negative space.