Have You Seen This Person?

For the first assignment of this week I decided to create a missing person poster for the assignment “Missing Person.” Since the assignment page encourages us to relate a few assignments to our class theme (Bob Ross) I thought this assignment would be the perfect one to include him in! So, I created a missing poster for one Robert Norman Ross.

To start off, no disrespect is intended by me doing this assignment. All of the information I included on the missing poster came from Bob Ross’s Wikipedia page, or was fabricated by myself (such as weight and height) since there seems to be no reliable source for some of the information. The date I used as the missing date is actually the day Mr. Ross passed away, and is not meant to be disrespectful in any way. I merely used it since it seemed like using a fake date would be wrong, and many fans of Bob Ross have indeed been missing him since his death.

I took a slightly different approach to this assignment than normal and used Google Drawings to create the poster. I could have used Pixlr or Photoshop, but I actually decided to create a poster from scratch rather than paste information into a template. So, the entire poster you see was made by me! It’s one of a kind! I did this because I did not like any of the templates I found and wanted to customize it in my own way!

For anyone who has never used Google Drawings, it’s a fairly simple interface that lets you include text, shapes, lines, and images on a customizable canvas. You cannot manipulate or edit images like you can in Photoshop, but it provided all the tools I needed to create a simple poster. I only used one shape in the entire poster, a black rectangle, to create the background in the header. I typed everything else myself using the DM Serif Display font for all the text included on the poster. The red line at the bottom is one I drew in myself to give it a little color instead of it merely being blank. The image of Bob Ross came from Google (found here) and was a generic one I found to be of reasonable high quality. The entire canvas was set to 8×11, so about the size of a normal sheet of paper, and is intended to look as close to a realistic missing poster as possible. After doing all this I downloaded the drawing as a JPEG and uploaded it to Flickr so I could embed it in this post without using up file storage on my website.

To be honest, this was a pretty simple assignment once I had everything figured out. It was kind of fun too, since I doubt many of us get to make missing posters for fun or for educational purposes. I knew from the moment I set eyes on this assignment I wanted to use Bob Ross simply because he’s such a huge part of our class theme.

Please tell me what you think down below! What do you like about this poster? What would you have done differently? Or who would you create a missing poster for?