I created this for an Immunization Fair that took place during the summer of 1999 at the U-Mass Medical Center in Worcester, Massachussetts. U-Mass has week-long series of immunization shots for employees, once or twice a year. The problem is, a simple flyer gets lost very easily on a hospital bulletin board covered with similar flyers... The idea was to create a design so unusual that people couldn't help but notice it.

I chose to make the poster appear vintage, as if it had come from the Victorian era. I studied similar, period adverts, then broke them down to their simplest common elements. I slightly modernized the Victorian sensibility, but utilised period typefaces. I also wanted a period image of a nurse, and after a lengthy search, I found an appropriate image in the Library of Congress' online archives. The only problem with the image? The nurse looked downright distraught, and so I spent a few hours in Photoshop reconstructing her face. She now looks only slightly melancholy (a massive improvement).

My mother, a nurse in U-Mass' Employee Health department, attributes the massive increase in innoculations from that summer's Fair to this poster (I know she's biased, but I like to think the design was an effective one).

The original poster was meant for bulk photocopying, so it was simply black and white. After it fulfilled its original purpose, I decided to 'age' it. Going back into Photoshop, I weathered the poster, adding water stains and that tannish, faded tone paper seems to develop over time.