Assignment (Visual) 191: Demotivational Posters

I’ve been around long enough to remember Steven Covey’s first edition, Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. I think there may be eight now so I’m sure that missing one is why I failed. Or that the bureaucracy tried to cram effectiveness training down our throats.

Covey’s work, I’m sure, led to the first wave of motivational posters. So I get some degree of adverse pleasure in creating my first demotivational poster.

Disclaimer: The quote is not mine but was identified as anonymous every place I saw it on the Web so no one gets credit. I would like to thank Fletchy182, somewhere in Germany, for sharing some fun photos of his first dive. There are no during or post shots, so I’ll just hope he was successful on his first try.

I had noted that Marcey recommended PixMonkey and I checked it out and decided that my old standby PowerPoint would serve this purpose well. I’ve done my share of PowerPoint dissing but for simple designs that you can save as jpegs this tool works just great. No need to bring in the high-powered programs. Besides, I find that when working with teachers, many of them tech nubies like me, that the sight of a familiar tool can be comforting.

While checking out PixMonkey, I came across a set of “toys” for visual editing that has such potential for making many of these visual assignments quick and easy for everyone. Yes, I realize that part of the motivation is to learn new tools, but for K-12 teachers who want first to focus on some fun, clever activities and later on tools, BigHugeLab is a real find. I’ll be sure to share.

Here’s my BigHugeLab-generated demotivational poster. I like that the photo stretches across the poster though it was severely cropped. Also, like the double mat look that would take me some extra time to accomplish.

It was great fun making my own demotivating poster using these instructions and it appealed to my cynical side.

I thought that the photo I took of the archer at a medieval reenactment might come in handy at some point and here we are, the perfect metaphor.  The second line was more of a challenge – I guess it’s all about adding to the headline in a clever way, not sure if I achieved that, but it’s suitably demotivating anyway!

(2 star visual assignment for ds106)