Ten Most Wanted

The Director told all the staffers to make a promotional piece/advertisement for themselves. For many years I'd thought that my department should have made trading cards made for the staff or the student assistants.

I tried to make a trading card, but, in my sleep deficit induced dehabilitation, I'd never be able to do a reasonable job with Illustrator or PhotoShop. I settled for imitating a wanted poster.

The first poster I used for a model was a US Postal Inspection Service poster for Sy Hien Nguyen. Nguyen ran a multi-million dollar identity theft ring along with bad check and credit card fraud. The wanted poster is interesting for two reasons:

• The two bands of blue are slightly different shades (0:0:153 or #000099) for the reward band and slightly darker for the bottom band (1:1:154 or #01019A).
  


• None of the sans serif fonts seemed to match the lowercase "n" the poster's fonts.
  

The color difference might just be an artifact. When I went back to check on the n's, the difference I remember wasn't as obvious. What I remember was that the width of the curve of the n as it connected to the vertical stroke was far wider than for any of the fonts I had. (I should really look into the effects of sleep deficit.)

I looked for an FBI poster in the hope that it might be different. Surprise - it was. The very first FBI poster I found was Usama Bin Laden's. The FBI poster uses serifed fonts one of which looks like Times New Roman. I don't know why design people despise Times New Roman, but if it is good enough for the FBI I wasn't going to quibble. Using only MS Word 2003 and PhotoFiltre (a freeware graphics program to resize images and adjust the color) I knocked out the poster. In this poster also the blue colors are different, with the top banner being lighter (0:0:205 or #0000CC) than the color of the text (0:0:255 or #0000FF).

The scary part was looking at pictures of myself: I looked haggard. (Note to self: get some sleep.) Can someone tell me why haggard in black and white is less upsetting than haggard in color? The best I could do for humor was to describe my eyes as "Penetrating, but kind" and for "Scars and marks" enter "Displayed on request." I listed the charges against me as providing solutions and sound advice. (It was late and the muse had already left to get a beauty rest.)

The next day, the boss said she like it. Mine was different. That seems appropriate. We never got around to discussing the advertisements. Somehow that too seems appropriate. We're scheduled to go over them again at the next staff meeting. (Given that my department is supposed to be a technology department I would have thought that we should have posted the adverts to a web page to save paper, but nobody asked me. As it is other staffers cranked off a lot of colored printing.)

(Maybe I can use the extra time to make a trading card for myself. What I'd really like to do is make something with a foldout. Many from my background will cite Jethro Tull's Stand-Up album as cool, if only for the pop-up of the band when the album gatefold opened.)

Just today the head of a different department sent an e-mail with the words "Promotion" and "permanently" in the subject line. I got a sinking feeling that the poster was going into my employee file.

What a relief to find that message concerned Adobe software licensing.