This PSA, which advocates for wearing bicycle helmets, features a red bicycle helmet, which takes up the top 80% of the board, set to contrast on a sky blue background with a faint cyan tire track. Because I want to emphasize how much safer one is wearing a helmet, I’ve replaced the buckle on the straps of the helmet with a typical seat belt buckle from a car and positioned the helmet so that the straps will fall at an angle resembling a seat belt. This PSA is aimed at young cyclists at my school who don’t wear a helmet, and because it’s more widely accepted that seat belts are crucial to safety and required by law, I’m looking to liken the two in their eyes. At the bottom is my tagline: “Buckle Up”.
Using Adobe Illustrator, I found reference images of a helmet and a seat belt and traced them with the pen tool. I then adjusted rotation and size, then added shading for depth. My reference images had large chunks of lighting on round parts of the objects, which would have been hard to cleanly trace. It was thus a challenge to convincingly add highlights and shadows for the illusion of depth and lighting. Over many iterations, I adjusted the position and thickness of the light and dark parts (some of which I ended up switching), and while it isn’t the same as the reference image, I am pleased with my helmet.
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