"I chose propaganda in order to support local bookstores. Plenty of businesses have been shutting down as a result of the pandemic. It is more important now than ever to support the people that have created their own business from the ground up. Big box businesses overcharge and support cheap labor, whereas locally owned businesses have a variety of explicitly curated choices by the shop owner. We must support these individual business owners as they are the backbone of society. Capitalism affects each one of us, and where we can support local businesses, we should. I chose bookstores as print is a dying breed. Most people do not buy physical copies of books these days, and when they do, they are buying from big-name retailers like Target. Commercial bookstores like Barnes & Noble have been diminishing over the years, so we can imagine how much worse independent bookstores are suffering. Physical text is a means of solidifying our history, whether fact or fiction. We must keep this tangible art form around. Supporting local bookstores causes us to support the people passionate about the circulation of knowledge and stories, which evidently, is what we all become at the end of the day. Firstly, I wanted the colors to be bright in order for the message to stick out. I used the phrase 'keep history in our hands' as it represents our history's physicality in a tangible sense. Before photos, books were the closest thing we had to be at events in the past. I used a photo of an independent bookshop and a group of gals reading to have the viewer connect the dots and make reading more appealing, even to those who typically would not. I put the main message inside of pages of a book to tie in the overall message and emphasize, again, the main message of the poster. I added shadows and strokes to the text as well in order to make it stand out even more."
