LET ME SPEAK
2020
Poster design for a social cause, integrating words and images.
LET ME SPEAK
Poster design for a social cause, integrating words and images.
These posters were done in May of 2020. I decided to go with "freedom of expression" as my social topic to address because it’s something that I often think about, and have seen in action being taken away, living in Georgia under Brian Kemp. I was also partially inspired by the press briefings Donald Trump had been giving every night, and how he liked to silence and mock reporters who have “bad questions”.
I came up with two taglines: "let me speak" and "This is America. This is America? This is America...". I ultimately ended up going with the first because it seemed a lot stronger as a statement.
My inital plan in my sketch was to use three illustrated characters of different non-human colors, but I decided to go with photos to allow for a greater emotional connection with the audience, using pictures of my friends. Starting out, I tried to follow my sketches but it clearly wasn't working, so I changed the composition to a close up and the color to greyscale for more emotion and seriousness to better fit the mood of the topic. I added a texture to the speech bubble to contrast it more with the rest of the page.
The tagline was the most difficult part to get right. I initially wanted a serif typeface to accentuate the seriousness but a sans serif turned out to be better in creating a bold statement. I changed the original phrase "let me speak" to a hashtag that would be easy to spread around online and added a new tagline above that, varying slightly between each poster version.
