A series of Public Service Announcements. This series highlights the words commonly used on the street for drugs use that also are words used in sports. The images are muted and the items used in the sports (soccer ball, hockey puck, football) are dirty and worn down. This is much like how drugs really make a person feel; muted, broken down, unable to find the goal of life.
There were a lot of steps to creating this project. I had to do some sketches on paper to work out slogans. My original campaign was going to be about good sportsmanship. It was a good idea, but I quickly found that people are more likely to pay attention to gritty Public Service Ads. I decided to introduce the idea of not doing drugs during sports. It was something that was just as important to me as good sportsmanship, so I had motive behind the change.
Once I changed the idea, I had to come up with some more sketches. I wanted to mess around with old and deflated soccer balls because I wanted to focus on soccer as the world sport. There were many ways to utilize soccer for this PSA. I could show a ball being pumped with drugs, but still being deflated and unusable. I could have a ball made entirely of needle syringes. Some of these ideas became too difficult to actually put together. I decided to stick to simpler shapes of making the needles and the ball the most important aspect of the poster.
My color compositions were a lot of fun to put together. I always enjoy getting into the digital part of a project. I decided that muted colors would work best. As you can see, the grass and the sky are grey tinged. I wanted this muting because it is how it feels when coming off of drugs. However, one of the issues I had was my "keep in line" slogan. It didn't work with needles, because "doing a line" is more snorting a line of crushed up drugs, not injecting something. My best color composition turned out to be my second one, so I went with that into my semi-final posters.
These were also a lot of fun to put together. I had to find free to use images of a soccer goal and needle point syringe, as well as an old soccer ball. I really got to mess around with placement of images and adding hierarchy. I wanted the goal to be a prominent image in the whole poster, so it is the largest thing. The typography was a lot of fun too. I wanted the second half of my message to really have feeling behind it, so I chose some decorative fonts. The "don't ****" part of the message almost blends into the grass, making it part of the field. The "drugs" is harsh and messed up, and not clean at all. This is the feeling that comes from using drugs.
Unfortunately, it became apparent that using the same image for the different posters didn't really look good for a series of posters. I also needed to take a second look at the typography of the first half of the message. I wanted something bolder and more obvious. I also messed around with how all the words were placed on the image. I also liked the idea of using other types of goals, so I picked hockey goals and football goals. All images are muted and dirty. The typography is the same across all images. Since I had more room with the football field goal, I was able to make the first part of the message bigger. With my hockey and football posters, I was able to change the order of the lines of words in the second half of the message. Overall, the words now work with the images instead of against them.
