DS106 Propaganda Poster:

I was scanning the Design Assignments bank looking for my next assignment, and when I saw this one I got reeeeeeally excited.

I love old propaganda posters from World War II era, so the DS106 Propaganda Poster assignment was practically made for me. Huge thanks to the guy who submitted it!!

So I went to compfight to browse through the creative commons propaganda posters until I found one I liked. I really wanted to use one that said “When you ride alone, you ride with Hitler,” but I couldn’t figure out how to apply that to ds106. Here’s the one I chose:

Then I was curious about the meaning behind the poster – women wanted for driving ambulances? – so I did a little research. It turns out that this particular poster was produced in Great Britain during World War II by the the organization Air Raid Precautions.

Anyway, back to the design…for eliminating the words, I referred to Mr. Levine’s useful blog post that was for a different assignment, but was done in a similar fashion. It seems simple and obvious to do, but I didn’t even think to do this until I read his post. So to erase the existing words, I just copied a piece of the background that didn’t have writing on it, and pasted it over the words I didn’t want. So I eliminated “As ambulance drivers,” “council,” “services,” and “defence.” In their place I wrote “For ds106 design,” “school,” “classes,” and “duty.” I also replaced the writing on the red car that said “Ambulance” with “DS106.”

The hardest part was finding a font that closely matched the poster. I ended up using the Helvetica Neue Heavy Condensed font, and used the color picker to get a color that matched the original words. I didn’t have as much success with this when I changed around the bottom part where it said “Civil Defence,” because that was a different font completely. I changed it to say “Civil Duty,” and though the font doesn’t match as well, it is a pretty small part of the poster so I think it’s okay.

So here’s your motivation, get out there and design!