If you watch professional hockey or live in the DMV area you’ve probably heard of Alex Ovechkin. He is a 14 year veteran and captain of the Washington Capitals. Throughout his 14 year career Ovechkin has placed himself along the greatest players to ever play the game. He has won several individual awards and has helped create a standard of regular season success in Washington. Prior to the spring of 2018 the Washington Capitals had never won the ultimate prize, the Stanley Cup. During the time Ovechkin has played on the Capitals, Known as the Ovie Era, the teams he led were almost always at the top of the standings and were annual Stanley Cup favorites. However ever spring the team would find new and excruciating ways to come up short in the postseason. Experts and the media would look at the teams failures and place large amounts of the blame on Ovechkin. They would make claims that he would never win a championship and that he wasn’t capable of achieving such a goal. Although he had the world against him he and his teammates kept working and finally broke through to secure the franchises and Ovechkin’s first Stanley Cup. Due to his perseverance he was able to achieve his ultimate goal and because of that I felt that his story would be perfect for this particular assignment. For this task I was instructed to create a motivational poster of my liking. I found a great website that allowed me to create one using a template that the site provided. The site and that template can be found here. I think that the over message and story I used for my poster worked out well and I think overall it turned out great.

For my final Design Assignment (2 stars), I decided to create a Motivational Poster! for Ella Maguire. She is going through a challenging time accepting who she is. She has been learning a lot of new things about herself, and they are not necessarily easy things to have to accept. Once again, I feel like I would want to give her advice if I could. If I could give her advice in the form of a fun Motivational Poster, it would be to “Be a Fruit Loop in a world filled with Cheerios.” Ella is a Fruit Loop in a lot of different ways. She is different than many people her age and most of her family. For starters, she just found out that she is a witch, which makes her pretty different… She is also questioning her sexuality, and not being straight is something else that makes her feel different. I would want Ella to realize her differences are actually super cool and make her more interesting, not worse, than regular people. She is special for important reasons. These differences may be hard for her to accept now, but she will be grateful for the gifts they bring her in the future.

To create this poster, I went to trusty Pinterest first to find a quote about being different. I liked this one in particular because of the rainbow connection between Fruit Loops and Ella questioning her sexuality. I then went to Google Images to find a picture of a Fruit Loop amongst Cheerios. I ended up getting the picture I used from here. I then went to Canva to create the graphic. I started by having to find a template that would allow me to make it landscape. I ended up going for a wide presentation format. I then enlarged the image and cut it so that it would fit well. I made the background black and then had to add the text. At first, I made all of the text white, and then I broke the text into three separate text boxes. The first and last ones were white and then I made each letter in the word Fruit Loop a different color to make the word pop on the neutral poster. I liked the simplistic color scheme with the pop of color from the Fruit Loop. Some people may find the black and white motivational posters cheesy, but I love them! I love Motivational posters. I also like the elements of those templates- they make the picture and most important word stick out.

Here is my poster for Steven Glass. This poster is here to motivate Steven to ensure he ends the world, just like he wants to.

This is for the Unnamed Midwife Character, this is to motivate her to keep writing in her journal to tell her story.

I knew I wanted to go into design again, and a thought that kept resurfacing was the fake vaccine that was prevalent in World War Z. Phalanx was a vaccine for rabies, and since the zombie pandemic was initially labeled “African rabies,” it was sellable. The whole thing was a sham to get money out of people’s fears (and “They did it to themselves” according to the creator Breckenridge “Breck” Scott).

To make this concept from the book into some form of media, I decided to create a motivational poster. I figured these would have been everywhere, for the makers of the “vaccine” to have a chance  to scare the most people out of their money.

I got the background picture from Unsplash courtesy of Benjamin Davies. I also happily got to use Canva again. Playing around with the words to make them legible was the hardest part. That and coming up with the exact wording for the “ask your doctor” part at the bottom. I wanted to be true to the company that advertised Phalanx, in how they never outright said they could cure the virus that turned people into zombies.