The core message of our poster is to not only
encourage voters to register for the coming elections, but to also inspire them
to vote for politicians that are honest, competent, nationalistic, educated,
and honorable. Through top-down processing in a socio-political perspective, we
posit that the status quo of the politicians in the country are otherwise, so
we try to encourage voters to register since their vote can lead to changes in
the current political system.
With this in mind, we made use of our previous
knowledge in our Sensation and Perception class to immediately recognize the
affordance of our poster and we do this by trying to capture the voters’
attention. We emphasize certain texts through changing font color and size to
accommodate stimulus salience. We also make it a point that the different
features of the poster are also in rapport with each other so as to help
observers easily integrate them.
Also, our poster can be divided into four layers,
and so we used Gestalt heuristics as well as figure-ground separation
principles to make each one distinct. Each area was established using the law
of common region. A black background separated areas for the top right corner
as well as the bottom portion of the poster. These were filled in with text in
the complementary color (white) as well as a standout color (blue) to make the
text more readable and accessible.
The background is seen as such because it is the
only portion of the poster that is “colorful”. The text written on it lists
down the characteristics of what our group wants to see in a politician. We
tried to make it resemble a checklist which we related to accomplishments.
White thumbprints were superimposed upon each trait instead of a check, in our
hope that whoever sees this poster might associate the check with voting. It
can also be noticed that some of the text in the background is cut-off. This is
where the law of familiarity plays a part, recreating the cut-off portion with
other information from the rest of the poster.
The middle ground of the poster consists of the two
people figures, with the female figure overlapping the male figure, thus adding
some dimension to our poster. These figures were put close together to
illustrate the law of proximity. Once again, the desirable politician traits
were placed around their border, thus establishing a connection between the
person and the trait and presenting these two figures as potential politicians.
For the bottommost banner, we made use of size
perception to highlight the important points of our poster. Not only is
‘BOBOTO’ colored differently (the same color as that of the thumbprint), but it
is also several font sizes larger, thus underscoring the main point of our
poster.
Color perception also plays a role
in capturing attention and differentiating different objects from one another.
It helps in perceptually organizing objects within our poster. In our case, we
made use of trichromatic colors, while opposing responses generated by contrasting
colors are minimized. Also, because of the concept of simultaneous contrast,
colors of the text on a black background tends to stand out more suggesting it
is something we want to emphasize, than the perceived lighter color of the text
on the light background.
References:
Goldstein,
E. B. (2010). Perceiving Objects and Scenes. Sensation and perception (8. ed.,
internat. ed., pp. 99-130). Belmont, Calif.:
Thomson Wadsworth.
