Commercial Art Students to Spread Positive Messages in School Hallways

The skills used to create these PSAs will be applied later this year when the students make movie posters

Students in Commercial Art are in the finishing stages of designing and printing creative posters they hope can spread positive messages throughout the Center for Career Services campus.

For this assignment, the students were asked to take a positive phrase or quote and design a public service announcement (PSA) on a poster. The poster should depict or embody the words, communicating the message to anyone passing by in a clear and creative way.

 Soon, the class will hang the posters throughout the school buildings with one goal in mind.

“We just hope it might make someone’s day,” said Lisbeth Ortiz, a senior from Sleepy Hollow. “We know that some days people might be struggling for whatever reason. Hopefully, they can see some of our positions, and it will make them feel better about what they are going through.”

Ortiz’s poster centers around the message that small issues can seem big, meaning they might feel heavier than they really are. Using illustrations from her iPad to create a design in Adobe Photoshop, she illustrated a person holding a duck. The person is seen with a thought bubble, which contains a memory of two people winning the duck in a claw machine game.

“I wanted them to use their critical thinking skills to select a quote and then show how they can creatively represent that message,” instructor Damian Powers said.

Powers praised the talent and creativity of his students, noting that this project is a springboard that will allow them to design posters for short films being produced by the TV & Sound Production students down the hall.

“We’re off to a really great start,” Powers said. “The energy in our classroom has been amazing.”

This year’s class will learn how to create other commercial designs in the coming weeks and months, including logos, signage, packaging and more. The PSA posters are an example of the students incorporating their new skills and knowledge into a project.

“We’ve learned page layout and how to make our images flow nicely,” Ortiz said. “This showed us how you can make something that is colorful and eye-catching but can also get your message across.”