Health and safety

HEALTH AND SAFETY

Health and safety is a very important part of the work place and there is an enormous range of images and posters to promote health and safety ranging from the more formal symbols to humour and full gore. 

Standerd health and safety symbols used world wide

A common safety poster found on construction sites

A more informal approach to using Personal Protective Equipment that can sometimes be more effective

as grim as it is, graphic pictures of the results of poor health and safety are also very effective, much like the imagery now shown on cigaret packets

Some franchises have released health and safety posters that make passers by more familiar with by seeing a character or image they recognise on a poster.

The four images seen above are my own versions of health and safety/ behavioural posters, I chose to take a more minimalistic approach to my designs so that the message is received much quicker than a more busy poster. I stuck to a minimum of 3 colours that contrasted well with one another, this helped  the image and text to be seen better from a distance and also saves on printing costs. I stuck with a similar theme with all of my designs where a central image would be sandwiched between text in a bold font and surrounded with a thick black border, this similarity between designs shows that they are a set and makes them much easy to remember. I tried to mix the humorous and formal elements of health and safety signs together to create my posters as I felt it would allow them to be taken seriously but not seem boring when seen.

When I printed off my example posters I felt that they were very strong designs but also noticed there was large empty spaces on some of my first designed (the bottom row) so I began to look at the spacing of my text to create a more filled image that would be more visually engaging. 

Finalising designs

As our group progressed towards finishing our designs we felt that a good flow of consistency would make the posters look more like a group rather than having a wide variety in designs. Below is our groups original designs and the designs we made by following a brief.

Our groups designs following the brief

Our groups individual work

When we started to make our designs all stick to a basic look we began by having our images in yellow and white on a black background as these colours contrast well and represent hazards and warnings.

We then had to use our own imagery to avoid copy right issues. Once we had our images we had to upload them into photoshop, put them into black and white, add a yellow and white duo tone and then add a fresco filter, we then made the images more engaging by editing curves and layers.

Here are my final two designs, my themes were Forklift awareness and Spatial awareness. My images were taken from work where I had access to a forklift and in college itself where we have a wide variety of PPE on site. Their copy lines were writ in Impact and the information at the bottom of the poster was writ in 12pt Helvetica, the images were cropped into squares and cut off with round edged squares. all over I felt these designs were much more visually engaging than my original ones as they will look more noticeable over a solid white wall.