Janet's Tunnel of Oppression Poster

Project #1: Since I had never heard of the Tunnel of Oppression before, the first thing I did was some basic research on google to find out about the event. Very cool event. Next, I made a short list of four possible topics for my project: 1) lack of adequate sanitation, 2) lack of clean drinking water, 3) India's garbage problem, or 4) world population issues. From this list I continued with my research, looking for both photos I could use and statistics, something that would grab attention. I chose to work from a photo because I knew my Illustrator skills were not good enough for this project. As it turns out my skills were severely lacking for even a basic typography on a photo type of poster. A huge "thank you" to the young lady in the digital lab for all of her help. I chose for my Tunnel of Oppression poster to make a statement about the lack of adequate sanitation in many parts of the world. I found a couple of photos I liked and the one I ended up using was picked because it was the one I could attain. I have an old Mac at home with Photoshop Elements on it, so after some initial pencil layouts with the typography, I played around on the Mac. I e-mailed the pieces to myself and went to the computer lab on campus. I was able to retrieve the photo but none of the type, but I knew how I wanted it to look. I had the statistic that 43% of the Earth's population is without adequate sanitation, which is a huge percentage, but I felt the more attention getting statistic is that because of that lack of basic sanitation a baby born in sub-Saharan Africa has a 520 times greater chance of dying from diarrhea than a baby born in Europe or the United States. So I took my new statistic and played with the type making key words, like "baby's chance of dying" and "520X", much larger than the rest of the type. After completion, I realized that I needed to have the sanitation statistic on the poster or people wouldn't be able to connect it as the reason for all the deaths, so it is hand written on the bottom. So here's my poster... Sorry, it won't upload, it says the image is corrupt or an unrecognized format, but it is a pdf.