Fibromyalgia Poster
sammybunny (88 points) | Thu, 2008-05-22 15:43
I've recently been diagnosed with Fibromyalgia. Those who don't suffer from it call it the "invisible disability" because they can't see its effects, but Fibromyalgia patients know all too well the effects of this symptom, so I decided to design a poster about it.
well, for some reason, when i uploaded this picture...it flushes to the right. how do i fix that?
just got to "view original" to see full image.
"View original" just gets a jpg with errors. Chances are that it is a cmyk jpg. Needs to be rgb.
Ok try that. It should work now. Thanks.
several thoughts.
the right-aligned body copy has a really bad left rag. you need to balance those lines so the rag on the left is reasonably smooth. there's no reason the four lines should be of such disparate lengths. it also looks like it's all bold, which seems to be too much. bolding a large section of text is generally counterproductive. i'd actually use a light or roman weight for that text.
the purple/red NFA bar at the bottom, is that a web header from their site? that's kind of what it looks like, as if you've taken the bar and placed it there instead of setting up your own "branding bar" at the bottom of the poster. it particularly looks odd so close to the edge like that w/o bleeding.
watch the wordspacing between fibromyalgia and the italic "is." the italics have made it look like there's an even bigger gap than there should be, so you'll need to kern that in closer. And i'd make your subhead two separate sentences and not capitalize suffer. And use the phrase "more than" instead of "over." that's the proper grammatical way to say that. an editor would tell you "those 3.7 million people don't hover over fibromyalgia, so they're not 'over' it. over is a spacial relationship, not a numerical relationship." oh, i've heard it so many times it's ingrained in my brain. So the subhead would read like this:
"It's no fib. More than 3.7 million Americans suffer with Fibromyalgia."
First off--ow. Sorry to hear about your recent diagnosis. It's not fun living with chronic pain.
The poster design, overall, is eye-catching. Couple of suggestions:
The red "Fib"--either bold up in black or make the same colour as the NFA bar; I find the two colours clash. Also, I don't know if you need to repeat your clever "fib" idea again in the subtitle. Instead of "It's no fib." maybe go with "We wouldn't lie to you.", or something along those lines...
"Without deviation from the norm, progress is not possible."
— Frank Zappa
"Art -- the one achievement of Man which has made the long trip up from all fours seem well advised." - James Thurber
Thanks for the suggestions, that's why I love this site. I'm in college, so all the criticism I can get, the better.
Yeah, chronic pain sucks, especially when you have to sit in front of the computer for hours working on things (even better, add a rainy day), but I work out as much as possible and I find that it helps with the pain.
I will work on those. Thanks!
I agree with the the suggestion about the red clashing with the bottom bar. Another thing is i think the paragraph on the bottom is too bold and a little hard to read. Try using a less bold font and see how that goes
life is great; without it, you'd be dead.
I realized when I went into my document that the bottom text was in bold by accident. Silly simple mistakes! Also, I updated it.
Your spine illustration would work better as a photo realistic illustration. It needs to be softer. Right now it's competing with the headline too much.