Amanda Baroletti
Professor Toohey
ENG 170-22
Visual Memoir
25th September 2022
Egg Drop
On the bulletin board outside the lecture center on the New Paltz campus, a poster promoting an egg drop competition is displayed. There is a graphic of a falling egg taking up the majority of the left side, orange text boxes disclosing the date and location of the activity and who oversees it, all on top of a light green background. This poster is meant to market the activity and make an onlooker want to participate in the contest. In a simple definition visual rhetoric is defined as using visual imagery to communicate a meaning and or message. This poster was overall not a successful piece of visual rhetoric because it does not make an observer want to participate in the event and or discover more about it.
The poster does not easily grab a viewer’s attention. Before going out and looking for a picture I passed this piece several times and paid no mind to it. The poster itself is small, measuring about 6 inches by 6 inches. This makes it very hard to spot when surrounded by much larger posters. The creators of the poster also used muted and dull colors when choosing the color pallet for the poster. The colors they used were green and orange, which tend to clash when put together because when looking at a color wheel they are not next to each other or in opposite of each other. This makes the poster generally unpleasing to the eye. The main picture featured on the poster, a falling egg, is also incredibly grainy, pixilated, and small. If you are not standing directly in front of the graphic it is incredibly difficult to tell what the subject of the picture is, as from far away it looks like an off-white mass with sharp black lines. The poster also features the unnecessary addition of curved dark green lines that resembling a topographical map. This all makes it hard for a viewer to gain necessary information about the contest, adversely affecting the visual rhetoric.
The important information written on the top and bottom of the poster is barely legible because the creators choose to use a non-outlined white font inside of a light orange text box. This makes the words hard to read even when standing close to the poster. The writing that it’s ending covers most of the right side of the piece is partially cut off so that the word “intact” is missing half of the last letter. This careless mistake shows that little thought was put into the graphic design of this piece. There was also the decision to use the slang “fren” instead of friend which would have been fine in theory if the poster had created a less serious, more light tone where slang would be common. Overall, the poor choices for the graphic design of the text diminish the visual rhetoric of the poster.
There are many ways that the creators of the is poster could have enhanced the visual rhetoric. This first thing that could have been done was make the size of the poster larger, even if it was enlarged to an average eight and half by eleven piece of paper it would have been easier to see and bring more attention to the advertised competition. If colors instead of green and orange were used, for example green and red or orange and blue, there it would appear more pleasing and draw more people to look at it in a positive mind set. If the creators didn’t want to change the color scheme, then they could have used brighter and more eye-catching shades of green and orange. Doing this would also offset the small size of the poster is they had to keep it within a certain size frame. A more in focus and less grainy falling egg picture should have been utilized, as the graphic seemed to be the focal point of the poster. By doing this, enlarging the picture and centering it more on the poster would have drawn more attention to sign and made it easier for a passerby to recognize what this competition was about.
In defense of the poster, the picture of the falling egg is great way to get the point across from a short glance. The information present is also positive as it allows the observer to obtain the information necessary to attend the event, and most of the text is written in a dark color and clear font. The Egg drop competition poster was unsuccessful when portraying visual rhetoric as it does not advertise the event well and does not make people enthusiastic to attend and participate.