Awareness Poster Final

 

First things first, I'm sure if you saw my awareness poster sketches you will know that this poster has nothing to do with biofuel, fossil fuels, or electrical power as an alternative to said fossil fuels. However, I happened upon an article this past week (which I will include a link to here, although it has a pay-wall) which I felt compelled to bring awareness to. The environment is still important, but I feel that a lot of people are already aware of the issues facing the environment, and they are either helping or not. But not everyone is aware of the degree to which migrant children are being exploited in the US. 

In my research, I found out that these children, some as young as 12-years-old are working in the worst jobs. And many of them are actually crucial to products that we use everyday such as General Mills cereal or autoparts. So I decided to include a cereal that is produced by General Mills and which is familiar to most who have had Cheerios growing up. This cereal is usually associated with positive things, but I wanted to contrast the familiar with what is hidden by including a silhouette of young children atop the cereal box. And the way they hold their hands connects to the title of the poster "A Chain of Willful Ignorance." This is taken from the article which highlights how the exploitation of these children is only possible because everyone, from the Department of Health and Human Services to the companies that hire the children, are willfully turning a blind eye to what is going on.

To create this image, I combined high-res images of a Honey Nut Cheerios box and a silhouette of children. I cropped and adjusted the size of the images to fit together like I wanted. I also used a similar color scheme to the cereal box to keep feeling homogeneous. However, I'm not sure if there is enough contrast due to the limited color scheme to make out the writing I included in the bottom-left. 

I know that this poster is not aligned with what I had originally planned to make, but I felt that this story was more important to tell because it is happening right under our noses and many of us are not aware. I hope that my poster brings awareness to the topic of exploited migrant children and please let me know if there is anything that I could've done better to make this poster more effective.

 

Works Cited

Dreier, Hannah. "Alone and Exploited, Migrant Children Work Brutal Jobs Across the U. S." New York Times, https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/25/us/unaccompanied-migrant-child-workers-exploitation.html. Accessed 5 Mar. 2023.