On of the projects I had the most fun with at BCIT was a series of posters and web ads I was asked to do for a volunteer campaign. The posters could be a fictional or real-life organization but should revolve around attracting volunteers for their cause. I chose Cetus, a non-profit, marine conservation society which operates in the waters around Victoria and Alert Bay, BC as my subject as I thought it was a great local cause and it was something I could relate to and be genuinely interested in. I had a lot of fun creating thumbnails for ideas for this project as I was able to brainstorm so many ways to communicate my ideas. The hardest part of this project was choosing my concepts from all of my ideas. After choosing my concepts for both the print and web campaigns, I did detailed roughs for the ideas and chose colour schemes before coming up with a plan of attack to execute my final projects..
Because I had so many ideas I liked with this project, I decided to use different ideas for both my print and web campaigns. To achieve the look I wanted to with the print campaign, I did everything in Adobe Illustrator, using flat colours and used the contrast of black and white to emphasize the importance of specific keywords. I also used the imagery of a Killer Whale to reuse the black and white contrast as well as the Cetus logo has a Killer Whale tail and the fact it is probably the animal most west coasters identify with. With the web ad I took photos of my own hands then I used stock images from freeimages.com of the animals and the background and merged them and created the ripples in the water using photoshop. I then used timeline in photoshop to gently rotate the animals and headlines in an animated gif to create an animated web ad.
The response I received from these promotions was all very positive. I think the extensive planning, thumbnails and brainstorming I did with this projects paid dividends in the final works. I think looking back on them after a bit of time I like the simplicity of the print posters and may not actually change much to them but I think I may be able to execute the web ad slightly better as I can see slight imperfections in the photoshop work which I believe I would be able to drastically reduce in future projects. It has been recently suggested that I send these campaigns to Cetus for them to use as some individuals who identified with their cause really felt moved by my campaigns so I am currently waiting to see what Cetus’ reaction is to these works.
