Assignment 1 - Posterize It

Today I decided to try my hand at one of the assignments in our assignment bank. The bank has 20 assignments, and by the end of the course, we are to have completed and posted 10 of them. I really like the flexibility given to us in choosing which assignments to do. Within each assignment there is additional flexibility, where inspiration and examples are given, but the choice of what and how to do the particular assignment is up to us as students. It took me a while to peruse through the various assignment options in the bank. I thought I would take the opportunity to try out Canva to make a poster, so I chose to do the "Posterize It" assignment. Here we are to create or remix a poster for an idea or concept explored this week. I looked through multiple examples and ideas posted, and settled on doing a minimalist poster of one of my favorite TV shows, Breaking Bad. I chose this because last week's theme was context, and time was spent getting to know each other online and sharing about ourselves. Breaking Bad was a series I really related to, being a scientist turned high school chemistry teacher (minus the illegal manufacturing of methamphetamine and becoming a drug lord...although in my last career, I did work with methamphetamine and other drugs of abuse).

This was my first time trying out Canva after it was recommended by our course instructor, so I thought this was a good place to start making my poster. I began by taking an online photo of a blue crystal that was sort of head-shaped and making it more cartoon-like using Cartoonize.net. I'm sure there are more sophisticated ways to do this using Photoshop or Illustrator, but I thought I'd try using a quick online tool.

Cartoonized version of blue crystal

Then I uploaded that into Canva and flipped it so that it looked more like a human head. Next, I played around with the shapes tool and made a hat to put on top of my crystal head and uploaded clipart of sunglasses to add to my face. Finally, I added some text -- the show title and my favorite quote from the series -- and uploaded a picture of a crystal meth molecule and played with the transparency so that the show title could be superimposed on top of the molecule. Here is the final result.

There was a lot of trial-and-error learning using Canva in order to make the poster look the way I wanted, but I think I'm generally pleased with the result. The only thing I didn't like about Canva is that I couldn't figure out a way to free draw if I wanted to. Maybe there's a way to do that in Canva, but I didn't find it. I will definitely continue to play with Canva to become more familiar with it.