Themester

Cassia Chryssovergis is a senior earning a BFA in Graphic Design, a minor in Art History, and a minor in Informatics. She will graduate in spring 2021.

For my Themester posters, I was initially inspired by an opinion piece titled Make Voting Mandatory in the U.S. by Dambisa Moyo. In it, Moyo discusses the low voting turnouts for U.S. elections and offers several solutions to combat this problem including mandatory voting. After reading the article, I knew I wanted my poster to inspire in people how important their voices are. With this in mind, I created a mood board that reflected my interest in the people’s power to vote, as well as an exploration of blue, pink, and red colors. From my mood board I sketched out my ideas and then moved forward with my strongest ones.

With both of my posters, I wanted to focus on the idea of the voice of the people and the importance of an individual’s identity within a democracy. The point of my posters is to show people that they should use the power that they have within a democracy and vote. To illustrate this, I focused on the image of a fingerprint, because each person’s prints are unique to themselves and it immediately signifies the idea of identity. I also decided to continue using the red, blue, and pink color palette from my mood board. When we think of democracy we think of blue and red, but I expanded upon this. Democracy is made up of all different kinds of people, so I incorporated some softer and darker versions of blue and red. Furthermore, there are countries apart from America that are democracies who do not represent themselves with blue and red colors, so I felt the need to expand my palette.

I was very inspired by this project from the start and did not struggle to come up with the idea for my posters. My biggest challenge was in the execution. I came to each critique session with a different version of the fingerprint because each time something wasn’t quite right. It was always either too big, too blotchy, or the wrong color. But finally, I had scanned my fingerprint in at a high enough resolution that you could see the smallest details, and finally I had landed upon the right color. It was very satisfying to reach a point in the process where I was finally happy with how the fingerprint looked. However, I have to say that my favorite aspect of the poster is the color palette because I gave a subtle nod toward democracy yet expanded beyond it.