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, 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.

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 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 at the top of the poster.

After submitting my draft post on blackboard I received some great tips on how to improve my poster by my peers. Most of my peers suggested I needed to do something to fix the big blank spot near the top of my poster that was caused by some of my pictures being different sizes, to fix this I made sure to use the guilds to help me divide the poster into 4 even size areas for pictures. Another peer recommended that I make the title bigger and more pronounced, they also noted that not everyone would understand what the “3rd team” is. To fix this issue I eliminated the baseball at the center of the group of pictures and instead moved the title to the top area of the poster above the pictures, I feel that it is now much easier to see and makes the poster easier to follow. I also added a second line of text on top of the “join the 3rd team today” that said “Umpires Needed”. I felt this would help to clear up any confusion someone not familiar with the sport would have. Last but not least I had a peer recommend adding the stroke feature to make a border around each of the pictures, I thought this was a great idea so I added a thin white border around each picture, I feel that this helps to separate the pictures but also makes the poster look more organized while still maintaining unity.

Overall this project was a lot of fun, and I learned so much about using photoshop while working on it! I am really proud of the improvements I was able to make from my draft post to my final post.