I have received my biggest project ever to take on. A deputy runs a career camp for kids to learn from different units of the Sheriff’s Office. The deputy reached out to me and asked if I could create a poster that they can post for social media. He also wanted it on a foam board to display and get all the deputies to sign. For the design itself, he wanted all units represented and to have great diversity. But the most important part to him was to make it look “cool” to the kids. What he meant by this was to make it look like an action movie poster.

To start the design, I went through all the photos Brittney has taken of the different units. I used action photos, like the photo I previously mentioned about the boat and helicopter. I used Photoshop to cut out the exact parts I wanted to use to compile the units together on the poster. It was fun seeing all these photos, but one main challenge was making sure no undercover deputies were in the photos on the board. This narrowed down the pool by a lot. After cutting all the photos to what I wanted to use, I imported them to Illustrator.

When I first learned Photoshop, I did not care about the program. It almost created more problems than helped me. After taking Digital Art Fundamentals at Stetson, my professor taught me how to use Photoshop to my advantage. I used selection tools to pull out what I wanted with photos and put filters on them. This made sure that when the images went together, they did not clash with each other. My professor taught us how to make photos stand out from each other, which I used to create shades in between photos for depth. I left space on the poster to give room for the deputies to sign the poster, so no pictures need to get covered.

But that was not the end of it: now I had to mount it on the board. I learned how to use the massive poster printer the Sheriff’s Office owns. I had to reprint a few times since the printer would make the design show darker, putting me back in Photoshop. After that, I learned how to mount the poster onto the board, cut it out, then deliver it to the camp. Although it was the most challenging, it has become my favorite project I delivered to the Sheriff’s Office.