Public Service Announcement

Alcohol Awareness

psa ad

College is drinking is often overlooked and not given enough gravity by college students. In order to catch a college students attention, an ad needs to be simple, yet striking. This is the point of a public service announcement; there is not a need to use a lot of text, just an eye catching picture and phrase.

For my public service announcement, after listening to the lecture, I chose the subject to be drinking because it was a large part of the lecture. I chose for the majority of the ad to be taken up by a picture because, as they say, a picture speaks a thousand words.The picture I chose was not as graphic as many of the pictures showing the consequences of drinking, but I thought it was interesting and artistic. I also chose it because I liked that the colors are monochromatic. From the picture, I decided to choose very simple colors for the entire ad. I chose the background color because it was dark, but still interesting. I chose light blue/gray for the text color because it is light enough to stand out from the background, but it is more visually interesting that white. The other aspect of the ad that I wanted to make stand out was the main tag line. I chose a thick font and an effect to make it the center of the ad. The text can be vague, but I think the picture gives the context, which then makes the text make sense.

My design preference is simplicity and clean lines. I used the principles of using between 1 and 3 fonts and blank space in order to avoid clutter. Although I am sure more interesting public service announcements can be, and are, created on Photoshop, we have not been taught the very complex skills in order to create a very complicated ad.