Splash Around

Artist's Statement

The concept for my poster assignment is a public announcement to promote healthy living. My goal is to encourage families to spend summer outside, being active and energetic. The targeted audience for my ad is children, teenagers and adults. Although the ad aims to show swimming as a summer activity, the message from the ad is to just spend time outdoors.
The program I used to create this poster was Adobe Photoshop CS. I anticipated some challenges with this project, such as getting my creative spark. I found that it took me much longer to think of an idea than it did to actually make the poster. Certain obstacles that occurred with the Photoshop program were creating a textured type as well as creating a choppy flow throughout the ad. I had originally planned to place pictures inside a different script, but the ad seemed to busy once I managed to accomplish this. I found that I wanted to place a filter on the text but I did not know you had to rationalize the text first. After playing around with settings of the program I learned of how to emboss the text. Flow throughout the ad was also another obstacle. I had to edit and erase many different parts of the original picture and in doing so I created a very blocky poster. I dealt with this issue by letting the background be a gradient of the same colour blue as the water. The illusion is now that the water goes on and on instead stopping and meeting the sky.
From this project I learned that everything comes with playing around with ideas. The original idea I had for this poster seems like an entirely different thought from this final project. Playing with the program settings was the way I learned how to deal with problems and technological stubbornness. Different sparks of creative flair would arise as I would learn something new about the program’s tools so I would morph my project to adapt to the new idea.
I do believe this ad successfully hits the target audience. No matter one’s age, race or gender, anyone can swim. The poster features a vast difference of people all seeming to love being in the water. The positive picture of people loving the water creates a feeling of wanting their happiness for oneself, which also re-enforces the message of spending time outdoors.