Poster Project: Designing a Public Service Ad
For this project, we were tasked creating a poster to represent a public service campaign.
This project began with some initial research, in which we had to search for existing PSA campaign examples and collect images that we found to be especially successful or appealing.
Categorize your favorite PSA posters. Some categories might be humorous, eye-opening, headline reliant, clever, image reliant, comparison, etc.
These posters represent some of my favorite designs from ad campaigns about environmental awareness, smoking, and hand washing:
The most difficult part of this project for me was actually selecting which campaign to create an ad for! Each campaign had a very distinctive and different style, which made choosing one tricky for me. By brainstorming a list of all of the campaigns I could think of, I was able to examine many options at once.
I ended up selecting the campaign that I chose because it's one that I couldn't find countless examples of: the "Share Goodness" campaign.
This campaign was started by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints in an effort to inspire people to share messages that uplift and inspire on social media.
Initial thumbnail sketches
After creating thumbnail sketches, I made some digital drafts and eventually settles on 3 designs to work into color comps:
Though I liked some of the ideas bouncing around here, they weren't working for me. The colors were too bold and distracting from the message, and they didn't feel cohesive.
I went back to the drawing board, and this time chose to play with some designs centered around photography and type rather than illustrations. I took peer feedback into account as well, and focused on the elements that most spoke to myself and others.
Here is the final result:
and some poster mockups:
One of the reasons that I selected the campaign I did was because I wanted to develop messages for a campaign that isn’t as well established as the original examples I looked at. If you search for posters about environmental awareness, smoking, etc. you will find countless examples of posters that feel cohesive.
As I started working on this project, I found that obvious branding choices were made based on what the message was about. I chose photographs that looked clean and wholesome. I chose lighter colors and symbols that didn’t feel heavy or over powering. I chose fonts that were easy to read and creative. I thought about existing LDS church advertisements, campaigns, and magazines that I have seen and how their compositions worked with the content they were presenting.
I started to understand a bit more why all of the posters I looked at looked so similar for each cause. When creating a campaign, you are essentially creating a brand image. That brand image will ideally take on a life of its own, independent of what entity is presenting the campaign, so that it will be instantly recognized.
Photos by Element5 Digital, bruce mars, and Porapak Apichodilok from Pexels