Evolution of Informational Poster for "Read the Fine Print"

1. Goal:
My goal with this informational
poster is to convince college
students of the importance of
digging into the bureaucratic
details of the administrative
aspects of college. My goal is for
them to persevere through the
boredom of becoming
bureaucratically savvy and
develop a new skill that will
serve them well throughout
their adult lives.
Audience:
My audience is all college
students. I think both first-
generation, low income students
and affluent students whose
parents are college graduates
need this message. College
students of varying backgrounds
have equal aversion to
proactively managing the
bureaucratic nitty-gritty of
college life, so this message is
for any student who steps on a
college campus.
Message:
My message is that taking care
of boring bureaucratic details is
important. It often makes the
difference between receiving
financial aid or not, or being
able to register for your classes
on time. My message is also that
college is time to start handling
your own business and rely less
on others (parents, staff) to tell
you what to do.

2. From the outset, I wanted the design to be
simple, mostly monochromatic with a few color
details, and evocative of boring, bureaucratic
stuff. I thought that calling out the boring
nature of “reading the fine print” was a must in
this information campaign—no point in trying to
make bureaucracy sexy and exciting with one
poster…it just wasn’t going to happen, so I
thought the stark honesty of “boring but
important” was the way to go.
I made this design before we read the chapter
on alignment, and now looking at the center-
aligned elements, I cringe slightly! I did get
contrast right with typeface size and structure,
but the fact that I used so many different text
boxes is distracting to me now.

3. For this design, I wanted to try situating my
message in a more concrete scenario that
college students would be able to recognize as
relevant to their lives. Discussions among college
students about what they need to spend their
time studying up on are commonplace, and I
wanted to show that “keeping financial aid
eligibility” is as important as studying for classes
that give you grades and show up on your
transcript.
I’m not crazy about the alignment I used, or the
choice to overlap text over the picture, but I
corrected that in the next design. I again
overused white text boxes here. Not my finest
design hour, I’ll admit.

4. This is a re-do of the previous design. I didn’t
overlap the dialogue text with the picture, and I
got rid of the white text boxes. I aligned things
such that the eye could travel left to right while
it went top to bottom and there wouldn’t be a
lot of bouncing around for the eye. I wish I
would have used more size contrast with the
fonts.
While this was an improvement over my previous
design, I still wasn’t in love with it. The picture
of the two students conversing do not at all go
with my desired “mood” of “boring but
important.”

5. I totally switched gears here. I wanted
to duplicate a bureaucratic form.
Forms are everywhere in our lives and
are boring and would NEVER be used
as an eye-catching poster! This was
the point—for a bureaucratic form to
catch someone’s eye on a poster
board and make the person think
“what in the world is a boring form
like that doing on a wall that is
supposed to be full of colorful images
and eye-catching headlines.
This particular design was supposed to
make use of repetition, and my
repeated element here was the
check-box and empty text fields that
are classic elements of a bureaucratic
form.

6. This is a version of my bureaucratic
form that makes use of contrast to
help make it more eye-catching. I
made some text boxes black and used
white font (Courier New font, of
course…the classic “typewriter”
font). I also threw in some red for
the “I have read the fine print”
acknowledgement. If my message
could be summed up in one phrase, it
would be “Read the Fine Print.”
I used just one image/graphic in this
design—my “Office of Important
Stuff” seal with the magnifying glass
in the center. I make it using Word
Art and incorporating clip art and I
think it looks hokey.

7. This version of the bureaucratic
form was from the color scheme
assignment (monochromatic).
While the color is bold and eye-
catching, it strays too far from
the style of bureaucratic form to
be “believable.” It doesn’t look
like a form you’d fill out
anymore—it just looks like a
regular poster that is trying to
make use of colors and shapes,
but it has too many words on it
to look pretty.

8. This one is my latest and
greatest. I kept the
bureaucratic form look, but
jazzed up the heading a
little bit with contrasting
font (both in color and
size). I added some more
realistic-looking items from
the world of bureaucracy
(e.g. official stamp,
signature flag sticker, “this
space left intentionally
blank”). I made use of a
few different alignments
for the purpose of looking
like a bureaucratic form
that isn’t super
sophisticated and that has
to pack in a lot of fine
print.