My research topic was about alcohol on college campuses. Specifically I focused on binge drinking and under-age drinking, and how colleges could curb the negative effects they both have on students. Below are two examples of images that were successful in their attempt to limit alcohol abuse:
I immediately found this picture to be very shocking. Which in retrospect is actually what the creator of this image was intending to do. He or she wanted to grab their audience’s attention. They wanted to grab their attention so they would actually listen to what they had to say. Without assuming too much about what the author was thinking, I believe the author understood young adults have constantly heard people telling them to drink responsibly and over time they have become unaffected by these attempts, so they put a gripping image of a man with a beer as his head on display so the people reading it would naturally be drawn to read the text. If the audience reads the text then the goal would be that they begin to associate drinking with violent crimes and other negative results. This would provide a better opportunity to limit binge drinking.
In a way the designer of this image took the same route as the previous one. He or she took an image that would take the audiences’ attention, but the image they chose this time was a familiar image rather than an out of the ordinary one. The author most likely assumed if a person saw this image they would stop and read it because they associate the format of it with the branded image “Keep Calm and Chive On”, but at second glance they would notice the message it had on it. The skull and cross-bones along with the writing gives a negative connotation toward binge drinking which is a smart rhetorical move by the creator of this image. This is another effective way of conditioning people to make more responsible decisions.