But God Ministries Haiti Poster Project

Summary: In this assignment I was asked to design a series instructional posters, catered to women and children, for a Medical Center in Haiti.

Background: This project was commissioned by But God Ministries. Which is a non profit organization that is present in many communities world wide, and works to help build sustainable communities. The ministry has a health center in Haiti called the Hope Center, they wanted a series of instructional posters designed that had a lot of imagery and minimal text and could educate the communities population on how to everyday tasks such as covering food and dousing fires.

Problem: In this project I was expect to make the posters easy to understand even if there were no words since a lot of the older population cannot read or write. I was also told to try to appeal to the women and children of the area. This posed to be quite a challenge not so much because we could only use limited amount of words, but because of the culture difference and we didn’t have an exact inventory of the things that were available to the people of the community, there were often times when I didn’t know if what I was trying to convey with a picture, which would be understood by someone from the United States, would be understood by the everyday Haitian of that village. 

Solution: I began by deciding which topics to tackle such as protecting your feet and hiding medicine from your kids. I decided on instructional posters that were vertically oriented and utilized cut paper, I felt cutpaper would have a friendlier look, and would appeal to children more. . This was my first project using cutpaper, it was a new experience, especially since I cut everything out instead of mimicking the cutpaper technique.

Work In progress

Final Posters

The Hope Center, and images of the final posters hanging

Outcome: I focused using a lot of bright colors that mimicked the colors of the hope center in order to attract young children with bright, but familiar colors. I also tried to your images of women whenever possible so the women of the community could see versions of themselves in the posters.  I also used cutpaper in an attempt to make the posters look friendlier and more like something a child could have created.

Reflection: Beginning this project I was mainly worried about whether or not my images would be comprehended well by a Haitian audience. There are some words on the poster that I was told could be translated by staff at the Hope Center  but since there wasn’t a translator available wanted the images to be able to stand on their own. I learned how to make the most of a project even when I didn’t have a lot to go on. Even though I wasn’t in direct contact with people from the Hope Center throughout the entire process I think I still managed to crate posters that could help the patients at the Hope Center.