advertisers constantly invent cures to which there is no disease.

The most recent project, "to develop the optimal graphic strategy for representing your object in a way that highlights it unique qualities, its assets and its potential uses" was harder than it should have been. 

Finding the qualities assets and uses of a pineapple shouldn't be hard-the pineapple is an everyday object that we see almost every time we walk into the supermarket-but pinpointing the reason it's necessary is more complicated with an everyday object. Looking deeply into the reasoning behind why a pineapple is grown, shipped, and bought is not a common thought process. 

So, I found Wikipedia to be helpful in finding more information on this fruit I wanted to know more about. I learned a lot, actually. It takes about 30 months to grow a full-sized pineapple; and they are grown on nearly every continent in the world. Pineapples have 3 types of vitamins: vitamin B, vitamin C & manganese. It is also a sign of welcoming or homecoming in many cultures (there's no wonder why my grandparents hung their "pineapple flag" outside their house every time we'd come to visit). I also found that in the Philippines, people scrape the flesh off of pineapple leaves, and use the fiber to create a textile called piña. However, I found most of this information to be a dead end.


I started thinking about the forms in which we find pineapple in a grocery store. There's the whole fruit, both fresh and dried slices, juice, canned pineapple, frozen pieces, and pre-portioned cups made for kids. My mom used to buy fruit cups for my lunches or snacks--they're really easy to transport, and easy to eat. I had found my target--mothers who wanted healthy options for their kids.

Dole Pineapple Fruit Cup

Now that I had found who I wanted to sell pineapple to, I had to figure out how. I knew I wanted to compare the product (fruit cups) to something unhealthy, but I didn't know what to use as the negative option. I thought that depicting a child playing in a fun, active environment would help show the healthy lifestyle mothers want for their children. I found a picture of a child on a see-saw in a gallery of photos people had taken for a non-profit called Kaboom! (they build playgrounds all over the world in communities where there are no kid-friendly spaces), and thought that showing the child playing with something undesirable (the mean kid, perhaps) could be equated with them putting unhealthy food in their bodies.

Taking the two ideas of the portability of the fruit cup and the health benefits of the fruit helped me to make an ad convincing mothers to take the healthy, but quick 'n easy route of buying these pineapple fruit cups.

Looking at my final project now, I see elements I like and dislike. I still like the idea of equating a child playing with a bad influence (the "bad seed") with eating unhealthy food, and depicting that metaphor with a child playing with the "bad seed." Showing the health benefits: "Dole Pineapple Fruit Bowls are loaded with B vitamins and manganese," was also a good idea, I thought. It was important to explain why the product was better than an unhealthy snack option. I also like the font I used--it's legible, and fun, but assertive with its all-capitals form. 

I dislike that I did not think about the hierarchy of the images on the page, and that it shows so well. The first portion of text: "If you won't let your child play with the bad seed at the playground," is completely illegible from afar because of the color contrast. The second part: "then why would you let them eat unhealthy snacks?" is better, but still not up to par. The image of the packaged fruit cups should have been the most important image on the page, not the child and the seed. The text shouldn't have been as large as it was, and should have (obviously) been legible in terms of its color. 

quotation on title block from http://www.quotegarden.com/advertising.html. Author of quotation unknown.