Industrial Revolution Poster (with a twist)

Here I was supposed to post an assignment I am proud of from semester one. I wanted to choose my production of Billy Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream because my iteration was considered to be, like, the apotheosis of theatre productions (because I did the scene where the acting troupe puts on a terrible play, so the audience didn’t realize I wasn’t acting when I sounded terrible). Unfortunately, the play was done live, so no one will be seeing my “awe-inspiring” performance again.

So anyway, here’s a poster I made:

Oh. You can't see the image. Well, this is awkward.

In this assignment, I had to design a poster advertising an invention from around the time of the Industrial Revolution, which still doesn’t have a completely definitive start or end. Nevertheless, the invention I chose, the airship, is definitely one of the latter years, but I wanted to do something steampunk and nobody could stop me.

The first ever airship was the Giffard Dirigible, invented by Henri Giffard in 1852. On September 24, the Giffard Dirigible travelled about 27 kilometres from the Paris racecourse to Élancourt. What made it special was that you could more easily control its direction because of its steam engine, propeller, and rudder (unlike with balloons). Henri Giffard also invented the steam injector in 1858, which was a more compact and convenient alternative to the steam pump.

The most difficult aspect of this project was using Photoshop to convert all of the images to make their styles match. (The overall style was supposed to look like a vintage 1950s ad.) I also tried to make Henri Giffard look a bit happier, because he looked very grumpy for a guy trying to sell you stuff. I then put everything together in PowerPoint, and made it look old in Photoshop. Yes, I sometimes used PowerPoint for photo editing instead Photoshop because I’m not very competent with the latter.

Oh. You can't see the image. Well, this is awkward.

But anyway, now I’m going to pull off the greatest plot twist in blog history.

I actually wrote all that stuff about the poster months ago. Why would I do such a thing? You see, I predicted that I’d eventually have to do an assignment exactly like this one in the future, so I did it in advance because I had nothing better to do. I may be a procrastinator, but I’m a procrastinator because I do things like that instead of work that is due the next day. Anyway, I feel I actually liked my comic about the Red River settlement more than my Industrial Revolution poster, but I’m not just going throw away all my prior work and redo this assignment, so here is said comic (if you are trying to mark this then you don’t have to read it):

French Revolution Magazine

A project I am proud of this semester would be the French Revolution magazine I worked on. I think it turned out looking quite nice, with some of the pages looking like they’re from a real magazine, aside from my pitiful attempts at humour.

Below, you can see the pages I typed up and designed, including two covers, one a fake to ward off the infamous Committee of Public Safety (the committee which executed thousands of innocent civilians and couldn’t care less about public safety). Then there are three biographies on important people in the revolution, a political cartoon, an advertisement, and a rubber duck I used to fill up some blank space.

I redacted the names of the others who worked on this project to protect their privacy, but I can tell you that Peng B. also worked on it, and his pages of the magazine are featured on his blog. I suggest you check it out.

Oh. You can't see the image. Well, this is awkward.

Fun fact: Unlike seemingly over half of this entire school, I do not know French, but people keep assuming I do for some reason. Feel free to curse me in French behind my back. My name is also not actually Blanc.