In this project, two rookies took on the daunting task of presenting a social issue in a non-depressing way. This initially proved to be quite the challenge, because most social justice issues are depressing in nature. Thus, this idea was born from the notion of "words have power." We wanted to physically portray the power that words have.  

Our inspiration for this project was quite simple. We both like the idea of the words covering the face, as shown below, and were set on dealing with the issue of bullying. When we were scouring the internet looking for a corporation to "partner" with, we came across this video that cemented our idea for two side by side posters with contrasting messages. 

At first, we weren't sure whether to do one positive poster, or the side by side posters. We eventually came to the conclusion of the contrasting posters. Initially, we had wanted to different colors of where the words show through, as well as put it on opposite sides of the poster; however, we decided that we liked the similarity between the placement of the words as well as the color of the background.  

As you can see, we tried the different placement and color of the text in our first version, but believed the poster lost something when the area around the wording was changed from black to red. We liked the fading out style that the black provided for the text. We also changed the image from color to black and white, as it provided some consistency between the two posters. 

We decided on these two posters for our final project. While we wanted to show a contrast between the posters, we also wanted to show how the same situation could play out, based on one's word choice. The posters at a first glance appear very similar, just as bullying may appear as just banter between friends; however, the more one looks at each of the posters, the more distinct they each become.