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I’ve been following this whole Bear Stearns mess of the last 5 days and I can’t believe how ridiculous it is. Have a look at the above graphic which charts Bear Stearns’s stock prices over the last ten years. Look at that red drop! Unbelievable.

Bears Stearns Company News - New York Times

Graphic Design created out of necessity has always fascinated me. There’s no creative brief. There aren’t any internal reviews of the work. Font choice isn’t labored over. It is just created and sent out immediately since time is of the essence.

Take this poster that was created after the murder of Los Angeles High School football star Jamiel A. Shaw II. The poster itself looks like any other poster that hangs from sign posts and traffic lights in urban areas. However, there are a few design choices that make this poster stand out for me. At the top, in bold and all caps, it states, “DO YOU KNOW WHO KILLED ME?” Even though it is in bold and entirely capitalized, it still seems understated to me. I almost feel that a professional graphic designer who was tasked to create this would have made some of the words larger. Maybe the designer would have splashed some different font colors in there to distinguish what was the most important word in the sentence. But here, it seems to grab my attention more than if it was trying to draw my eye.

The next thing is the image choice. Jamiel is too far away in this picture to be accurately identified. Though, the fact that he is the star running back on the local high school football team (who was actively being recruited from schools like Stanford & Arizona State) really helps paint the picture of who this young man was. If I were a neighborhood resident and noticed a picture of the local star athlete in the uniform most people associate him with, then it would be a little more jarring for me.

Below that it says “$55,000.00” in large (larger than anything else on the page) bold numbers. What’s more is that the creator added the “.00” at the end which makes it seem like even more money that is being rewarded. In a poor neighborhood, I’m sure this stood out the most and would help bring people with information forward.

At the bottom it gives you the identity of the murdered individual and contact details if you have any information. Everything is in caps, but it still gratuitous to me. In a way, it is one of the only reasons for something to be comprised entirely in capitalized letters.

What I believe this poster illustrates is that in this stylized world of design, it still really comes down to the message. What good is a poster if it doesn’t convey the message properly? If this poster had been plastered with several images of Jamiel or utilized different sized fonts to attract attention, then I don’t think it would have worked nearly as well. This stark poster with the perfect image really makes me take note in a world cluttered with other posters meant to ‘stand out’.

An arrest was made in the case on Tuesday, March 11th.