Baby Fat Poster

Artist Statement
Maggie MacPherson
Oct. 7th, 09
For my Photoshop poster assignment I chose to use a topic I am passionate about, vegetarianism. I wanted to be specific, so I chose milk, and the negative health effects it has on people, specifically children. I chose a target audience of women, 18-35, especially those who may be pregnant or already have young children. This is because it is much easier for younger people to change their way of thinking about milk than it is for older people. Pregnant women and mothers are much more likely to educate themselves on the truth about milk because they are responsible not only for their own heath but for that of their child as well.
The process of creating the poster taught me a lot about Photoshop. I spent a long time playing around and discovering different choices I could make. I wanted to keep it simple, focused, and yet informative. Some of my drafts had a lot of excess information that made the poster look too busy and complicated.
I started off by resizing the picture of my roommates friends baby, Josh, so that it would fit the poster size of 8x10 inches. Then I used the polygonal lasso to cut out the baby and paste it onto the blank background of my poster. The baby already had a questioning expression on his face but I wanted to exaggerate it so I distorted the eyebrows by moving his inner eyebrows up a little. I wanted color to make the poster more attractive so I selected the eyes with the magic wand and changed the color of them to blue by using color balance.
I created a black background and chose white lettering. I made sure I used CRAP. White and black are my favorite contrasting colors because they are simple and effective. I know people are going to want to know more so I put the website in blue lettering against a white strip so it would stand out against the white lettering on black background. I repeated the color white, as well as the color blue in his eyes and the CTA at the bottom of the poster. I played around with the alignment until I found positions which were as pleasing to look at as possible, and I made sure none of them covered Josh’s face or were too close to each other.
I learnt how to adjust the fonts kerning’s and other aspects such as covering parts of the feet in the word “got” until I found a look that I thought resembled the “Got Milk” campaign as much as possible. I used drop shadows to make the words more visible on the lighter parts of the poster.
I faced quite a few challenges when creating this poster. My first challenge was coming up with an original idea. I had started a CD cover and almost finished before I realized I didn’t like it and had a much better idea. The CD cover was taking forever and didn’t look very good at all. It looked this way because I didn’t know what the CD cover was about, who it was for, or why I was doing it. Once I came up with a focused concept, everything became much easier. My biggest challenge after that was making sure the poster wasn’t too wordy or busy looking. I deleted a lot of statistics and quotes that crowded the page and made the message unclear.
In conclusion, I am happy with the outcome and hope that my message interests people enough to check out the website and learn more for themselves. Most of all, I am happy to know I can create an image which grabs attention while also looking professional.