For this project, I chose to try and persuade my audience to want a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, one of my favorite lunch choices since I was in grade school. From the beginning, I knew I wanted to utilize pathos as my persuasive method. For most people, peanut butter and jelly was a food staple as a child, and as a result, the nostalgia that this food brings would easily trigger a person's emotions. I knew a good catch phrase was extremely important to my poster, so I began this process by thinking of short but clever statements that related to peanut butter and jelly. Two of the statements I thought of related to the ingredients of peanut butter and jelly; "salty meets sweet" and "better together". The third phrase came about after I googled "peanut butter and jelly" and came across "peanut butter jelly time"; the most obnoxious and bizarre song so many people hate to love. From there, I experimented with using the main ingredients of the sandwich as my main imagery as well as the sandwich as a whole. I also came up with the idea of incorporating a paper bag into my poster to use as a frame or background texture. After talking with Ange, she suggested that "it's that time" was my strongest phrase and I agreed with her choice. At first, I wanted to go for a pop art look. I created a pop art drawing of the sandwich, bold, block letters for the text, and a half-tone image of a paper bag as a background. While my idea seemed cohesive, creative, and direct, during our first class critique, I received feedback that the sandwich image was hard to read as peanut butter and jelly and there was tension between the "peanut butter jelly time" theme and the nostalgic presence that the paper bag evoked and I needed to commit to one of the two.
In the end, I chose to take the direction of the "peanut butter jelly time" theme. In order to successfully achieve this idea though, Ange reminded me that I needed to further research the iconic elements that make this song so well known. The bit mapped cartoon of the banana is the main identity of the song, which made me think that I could incorporate this into my design as well. Seeing that I was already struggling with my image reading as peanut butter and jelly, I decided that it would be best to bit map the two main ingredients of the sandwich: peanuts and grape jelly. I wanted to continue to use big, block text for my typography; however, Ange pointed out that using Arial Black font did not connect as well with a bit mapped image. Thus, I altered some of the letters in the text to appear bit mapped as well. At first, I divided the poster into sections: 1/4 text (black background, white text) 1/4 image (white background) and 1/2 text (black background, white text). This arrangement though, separated the elements of the poster rather than connecting them. Instead, I positioned the imagery next to the first two lines of text, breaking the barrier between the black and white background. Overall, I had difficulty adjusting to the bit mapped style that this poster called for because my design aesthetic is partial to precision and crispness. Though I felt slightly uncomfortable, I am happy with the finished product. I think that the statement, in particular, is catchy and thought provoking and all the elements of the poster successfully relate to "peanut butter jelly time". Here is the finished product!
