The message that I ended up going with for my PSA was Focusing only on personal responsibility often neglects the bigger picture. The image I ended up creating for this was two people walking through the rain one with a newspaper the other with an umbrella, with the umbrella in a complementary orange color to the background to emphasize it. In the background, I added a healthy amount of fog and a crowd of people also carrying orange umbrellas. I hoped to convey the importance of examining extenuating circumstances rather than only looking at individual actions, and examining broader systems rather than individuals.
I created almost all of the image in Illustrator, (with the exception of the layer at the very back which is just some colors blended together with a Photoshop smudge brush). For the fog, I made heavy use of the gradient mesh tool and also briefly used the new freeform gradients to try creating a simple puddle. All of the people in the image are very simplistic and have their faces obscured both because it's not necessary to convey the message and because I don't have very much experience with drawing people. For the message font, I went with Highway Gothic for a clean easily readable sans serif font. The crowd is also made up only of simple abstract shapes so that it blends into the background more easily and helps add a bit of depth.
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