Internet Censorship Public Awareness Poster

Technologies: Adobe Illustrator, Photoshop, Wacom tablet

For our Digital Design Foundations class, we were assigned to create a public awareness poster about a subject of our own choice. During that time SOPA was a really big issue, I decided to base my poster on that. Even though the poster would specifically be about SOPA, its main idea could still be considered as Internet Censorship.

Initial concept sketches: at this point I was just exploring the concept and seeing what I would be able to come up with. It was an interesting challenge to represent Internet as simple as possible. I thought I’d be able to use icons of well-known websites/web browsers to achieve that.

I really enjoyed the “shooting the Twitter bird” idea so I decided I would stick with that and take it further. The next step was figuring out what I could add that would improve the idea. Adding some more icons that were “shot down” seemed like a fun idea, so I tried that out. I also had to decide whether I wanted a more cartoon-like look, or a realistic look. Was I going to draw Uncle Sam? Or just find reference photos and play with it on Photoshop? The answer lay somewhere in the middle; I constructed my own Uncle Sam in Illustrator, using a couple of reference pictures and then adding some textures so that it looked a bit more realistic and fit the environment.

Then I put all of the icons together, and tried to make small changes on each one of them so they looked “dead”. (The x on Internet Explorer, cracked Youtube screen icon etc.) I added some gunshot wounds and blood to finalize the poster. The only part I’m not completely happy about is how the blood sits on the ground, but other than that I felt like the poster conveyed its message pretty clearly.