A few days ago, a new alleged reading promotion poster from the Chicago Public Library came to my attention.

I shared it with some colleagues, and one responded with this graphic.

Weeding is librarian talk for the process of removing outdated and unused books from the collection. But when I read “weed a book,” I hear it in Elmer Fudd’s voice.

So this all made me think of the ALA Read poster series, which just happens to be a design assignment. I found a few images of Elmer reading, and played around with one, thinking about the poster series and the weed pun. Some of the posters use an Indiana Jones font, but I think the more classic Schoolbook font is more fitting. I thought about adding a pipe or two, going further with the pun. Since marijuana is becoming more legal, and some books are becoming less, I thought about incorporating that. I thought about using The 1619 Project, but that could be misinterpreted so I went with Maus. At this point I was just playing with ideas visually.

by King & Weeks, from Batman/Elmer Fudd Special 2017

As I thought about it more, it seemed that more subtlety was in order. I don’t need to spell out weed, because anyone who knows their Looney Tunes will get it from read, and anyone who doesn’t know about Elmer’s speech issues won’t get it anyway. With that in mind, the pipes were overkill too. I needed a subheading to highlight the legality issue though. I also need to make it look poster-like. My approach here was to use the Golden Rectangle for the dimensions. I made a new Photoshop image using those proportions, and pasted the Fudd picture in. I scaled it up to fill as much of the space as possible. It was still short, but the READ text filled most of the top part. I did some copy-paste work to extend the image upward. That was a bit sloppy, but it’s in the background so it’s not too distracting. I put in While it’s still legal! as a subhead. There were contrast problem with the image underneath, so I made a white copy of the subhead, applied a bit of blur, and offset it a little to make a white drop shadow, making it more legible. That didn’t fit well with the flatness of the READ headline, so I used an Emboss filter on it to give it some complementary dimensionality. I think it works. Some people won’t get the pot joke, but the right people will.

For this assignment we had to create a READ poster. I decided to take mine the comedic route and make fun of the one and only Donald Trump. I’m not sure if it has been made clear from my other posts or tweets, but I am not a fan of Trump. I may actually be his #1 un-supporter.

I first googled a picture of Trump reading (which honestly, there aren’t many pictures of…). I then put a slogan on top of the image in the ways the old READ posters did.

Here is the outcome:

Hope you had a laugh

For my final design assignment of the week, I did the “Create A READ Poster” assignment. I picked this one because as soon as I read the description, one of my favorite pictures came to mind.

There’s a picture my mom took a few years ago of me, my dad, and my brother. It was the day the three of us each got our first pair of glasses; we’re each reading different books. I’m reading Harry Potter, my brother is reading Great Expectations, and my dad is reading a rock and roll coffee table book – upside down.

It’s a funny picture, so I decided to turn it into an even funnier READ poster.

It was pretty easy to upload the picture to Canva and add the text. The picture works well theme wise, and it’s already well balanced. I played around with the text until it felt well-balanced too, and I played with the color scheme until it reflected the warmth of the picture while still standing out.

I’m pretty pleased with how it turned out.

For the Create A READ Poster assignment, worth 3.5 stars, DS106 students are challenged to make a poster urging people to read in the style of the posters made by the American Library Association. I immediately thought back to an unexpected discovery I made once. Apparently Marilyn Monroe loved to read. Just Google “Marilyn Monroe reading” to find more images like the one above. Sure, some of them are of her reading scripts, but she also often had her nose in all kinds of pleasure reading. In fact, there were supposedly 430 favorite books that Marilyn Monroe had read and kept in her personal library! Unlike many of the fashion icons, actresses, models, and celebrities of today (cough Kardashians), Marilyn was beauty and brains in one package (not to mention a lot more gorgeous than today’s models, but anyway, if you want more of that you can see from the many pictures of her that I have pinned).

As per usual, I used Drawings in Google Drive software. However, this time I’m going to structure my tutorial a little differently, in case the format of the other tutorials did prove helpful to anybody by itself.

How to make a simple text poster on Google Drive

Step 1: Insert Drawing into A Google Doc

Click Insert from the menu at the top, and scroll down to the fourth option, Drawing.

Simply open up a Google document, slideshow, or even spreadsheet, and this option will exist just the same.

Step 2: Inserting an Image into Drawing

When you click on Drawing under Insert, this window opens up:

Click on the the Image icon on the Drawing window menu, which I am mousing over in the following screenshot so that the label shows (my cursor will not show on screenshots for some reason).

When you click on that, the Insert Image window will appear. It allows you to add images by URL address. 

To get the URL address for an image, just right click to get a menu like the one below:

On that menu, you click Copy image address in order to, that’s right, copy the image’s address! (I don’t know how I survived without this handy tool. If your computer’s menu doesn’t work like this though, you can just click on the picture and copy the URL address from above, just like I did for the YouTube video in my last post.)

And of course, you paste it in. A preview should appear as follows. If the preview appears and looks good, click Select. Otherwise, there may be an issue with your URL address. 

Hitting Select should return you to the Drawing window with your image. And there you have it! It should look like this:

Step 3: Superimposing Text

After I got my picture, I still had to add text. To do that, you click on the Text box icon on the Drawing menu, which I am mousing over in this screenshot so its labelled:

Draw a text box by dragging the cursor to expand it. You can also move this text box around.

Finally, you can add in what you want to say. In my case, I wanted to make it clear that reading makes you beautiful. To add to my message, I considered the connotations of different colors before deciding on what color the text and highlighting (for text visibility) would be. Pink is a soft, feminine color associated with beauty, and its fairly visible on the pale yellow. I usually don’t like to do colored text, especially on a colored background, but luckily in this case it adds to the 1950s aesthetic of black and white photography and Marilyn, but is also fairly readable because most colorblindness is between red and green rather than composite colors like pink and yellow. Finally, the bright, vibrant color of the text and highlighting also set the text apart from the black and white image, making them more likely to catch your attention.

When you’re happy with the appearance of the text and image, just hit Save & Close to have your image in a Google document.

Hopefully this new format of tutorial helps anyone who still felt uncomfortable with Google Drive. Its such a lifesaver, as you can probably tell from the face I’m constantly using it for this class.

And remember: reading is beautiful!