Photography at this point is second nature to me, but design on the other hand, is something I’m just starting to get familiar with. Working with Adobe Illustrator wasn’t as intuitive as I thought it was going to be, and was much more complicated than its cousin, Photoshop.
Right now, I’m taking a course as a part of my masters — Communication Design. (Previous assignment can be seen here…) Our second assignment was to create an advocacy poster. At the time, the DOMA and Prop 8 hearings were going on, and I wanted to create something about gay marriage and human rights… But as you can see, that’s not exactly how things turned out…
Statement:
For my advocacy poster, my original idea was much different. My first poster design was for human rights, specifically in relation to the Supreme Court’s hearing on gay marriage. After class, I was mulling over my concept and thought it was just too complicated. My cat was being very photogenic, and I captured the image for the poster that night. Immediately after looking at the image, the idea popped into my head.
I decided that with the image effects, and the concept of an abandoned, shelter pet, a grungy, bold typeface would be the best choice to capture attention and keep with the theme of the poster. The simple statement, “Adopt a Shelter Pet,” drives the message home, to make sure the idea is clear, and I added the logo of a local shelter to make it a little more real.
Writings and Such 
April 4th, 2013 at 7:52 am
Excellent – I am a huge supported of animal rights and shelter adoption (all my cats have been rescue cats) and your poster really works for me – So much so that I’d publish it in the paper I work for as a PSA,
April 4th, 2013 at 7:56 am
Glad to hear the concept worked for you, and I would be incredibly flattered to have my poster published somewhere. What paper do you work for?
April 4th, 2013 at 8:09 am
I am Production/IT Director for The Hour Newspaper in Norwalk, CT – This would be used as a PSA filler when space is available – I would need it as a Hi-Res PDF – you can add a “designed by” slug that the bottom is you wish.
April 4th, 2013 at 3:35 pm
Oh, excellent! That sounds great. I can add the slug and should be able to get a larger PDF to you this weekend. Is there an email I can reach you at?
April 4th, 2013 at 4:05 pm
Feel free to send it to the following two emails:
ads@thehour.com
robert@digital-infrared.com
Please put PSA in the subject line and attn Robert M in the body copy. I will let you know when they run – if you want, you may provided a mailing address for physical copies of the paper to be sent to. Otherwise, I’ll ship a PDF to you via the email you send from as soon as they run. No idea when they will run as PSA’s run when we have space.
April 4th, 2013 at 5:23 pm
PS – try to keep files under 5MB to thehour.com account
April 11th, 2013 at 12:57 pm
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