For this assignment I decided to make an umpire recruitment poster. This relates directly back to my main topic of baseball from an umpire’s perspective, there is an extreme shortage of sports officials and umpires are no exception to that. Local Leagues and Associations are doing everything they can to recruit enough umpires to cover all the games in the season, I thought a recruitment poster that highlighted the profession could be helpful in those efforts.

In the reading from this module we learned a lot about how pictures can be used to tell stories, that inspired me in the design of my poster. My goal was to tell a story about umpiring and highlight all the reasons someone should make the decision to “join the 3rd team”. The pictures I chose highlight the action of calling a pitch behind the plate, running a coaches meeting before the game, all the training that goes into the job, and last but not least the group camaraderie that comes along with umpiring. I wanted to show multiple parts of what umpiring consist of as well as incorporate the design concept of unity and make sure all the pictures appeared to go together and tell a story. I feel that I was able to do this successfully.

The pictures I used for this assignment do not belong to me. The four main pictures were taken by some of my fellow umpires Jason Blacker and Rob Thompson, they both gave me permission to use these pictures. The baseball in the center was an image I found on Flicker, in the caption to the poster I put the original link to the picture and creative commons license.

During the actual creation of the poster I used lots of the techniques we learned in the photoshop tutorials. One of the main techniques I utilized was using clipping mask to embed the pictures into a specific area, in this case the four corners of the poster. I also used the clipping mask to put the baseball picture in the center of the poster. I used the cropping tool and paint bucket tool many times during this project. Last but not least I used text and layering to place the text on top of the baseball.

Some of the challenges I encounters while making this poster were that not all the pictures were the same size, and some were landscape and others vertical, this caused there to be a large blank space in the upper left hand corner of the poster. If anyone has some feedback or advise about what I could do to troubleshoot this that would be helpful. I also tried to incorporate the text displacement we learned in the crumpled paper tutorial with the text that I put on the baseball. Sadly the text was so distorted that it was illegible! I would still like to figure out if there is a way to make it so the text looks more like writing on the baseball, if anyone can help with that I would appreciate it as well.