This is a PPT of the progression of my poster through the term.

1. Goals, Audience & Message
1. Goals: My overall goal is reducing adult illiteracy in my community.
2. Audience: The target audience is adult non-readers and those who want
to improve their reading skills.
3. Adult functional illiteracy negatively impacts employment.

2. 1st design

3. This was the first design and it needed a lot of work. I used a center alignment,
which I later learned wasn’t very recommended and a chunky serif Cooper Black
font that I thought would catch a reader’s attention. Although we hadn’t studied it
yet, there was a bit of contrast in the font color, but because the yellow was on top
of the photo, it didn’t work that well. This design left a lot of room for
improvement in the weeks to come.

4. Week 5:
Proximity
and
Alignment

5. This design is a proximity and alignment design from week 5. Instead of having a
center alignment like the first design, I used a right alignment. I also changed the
font from the heavy serif Cooper Black to sans serif Segoe UI Bold. Although that
wasn’t what we learned in this week, it made the legibility and readability much
better and easier. The change in background color from a grey texture to a solid
blue also helped to enhance the design. I used an artistic filter on this photo to
bring out certain features of his face like the razor stubble. I also used one of the
blue hues as the background color. The spaces between the paragraphs gives the
text good proximity as it defines that these are three different parts; the title,
subtitle and the body of the text.
I think that all of these changes gave this design a much cleaner look, but there
was still a lot of work that needed to be done.

6. Week 6:
Repetition
and
Contrast

7. This design was a repetition and contrast design from week 6. There were radical
changes to the design’s look from week 5 to week 6. Instead of one large photo, I
used three small photos whose size was repeated to illustrate three ways that
illiteracy effects adults. I rewrote and reduced the text, which made it easier for
the reader to scan, and grouped the important information into three columns,
creating repetition. The columns created better chunks. I chose a different
background color because I thought it contrasted nicely with the black and white
text. I used color contrast and repetition in the title and in the conclusion text by
having white letters on top of a dark background. I also used size contrast in the
fonts. The title’s text is a 250-point font and the font in the photo captions and the
bottom text box are a 140-point font. The text below the photos is 120-point font
which wasn’t enough of a contrast and, in retrospect, created a conflict. A better
way to have created contrast there would have been to have used a contrasting
font like an oldstyle font or to have made the photo captions an appropriately
decorative font and kept the explanatory text as is.
This was a good design, but could be better.

8. Week 7
Style and Color

9. This design is from week 7 and concentrated on style and color. The style I was
trying to communicate was uneasiness. By taking one of the three photos from
the previous week, making it black and white and putting a bit of a blur on it
helped to achieve that. The font color choices are good because the yellow
contrasts with the background and stands out really well. The black and white
text repeat the black and white in the photo. However, the font choice did not
lend itself to the style I was trying to create. I was having a difficult time
downloading fonts to GIMP and given that restriction, I used the decorative
Kristen ITC Semi-Expanded font. With the exception of the font, I really like this
design.

10. Week 8:
Type

11. This design is from week eight where we focused on type. I was able to download
many different kinds of fonts this week which made communicating the uneasiness
style I was trying to create last week much easier. I used three fonts for this design:
• Static Age Heavy Condensed for the title,
• Plateia for the words prison, poverty and unemployment and the lines next to
each word
• Arimo for the bottom text
Although the usual rule is to only use two fonts, I think using three fonts is justified
because the Static Age Heavy Condensed and the Plateia font both respectively
convey uneasiness and fear. I think that these two fonts work well to convey the style.
The yellow in the title jumps out at the reader and contrasts well with the black and
white fonts. The words prison, poverty and unemployment stand out because of their
weight and the use of black against the background.
This design is really getting closer to what I'm looking for but still is not quite there.

12. Final Design

13. The final design kept quite a bit from what was in week eight’s
design, but I changed the size and the colors of the font caption,
repeated the Static Age Heavy Condensed font for the subtitles of
prison, poverty and wages, used split complement triad colors for the
information about prison, poverty and wages and changed the text at
the bottom from what was in another Week eight design not shown
in this presentation.