Poster Annual - Strength in Numbers
The Australian Poster Annual is a competition run by the National Design Centre, each year it has a different theme. 2008's theme was "Strength in Numbers".
My idea for the poster was to pay tribute to the thousands of Australians that lost their lives during World War II. Initially I approached the Australian War Memorial and asked them to supply me with an Excel Spreadsheet of the Roll of Honour. They said they couldn't do this, despite having a searchable database on the website. So after a few more enquiries I decided that I would have to harvest the names and service numbers myself - so I wrote a program that queried the search page (using surnames starting from A-Z), then queried the profile page of each individual to determine their cause of death. If the cause of death was listed as "Killed in Action", the service number was then recorded in a SQL Server Database.
The final list came to just over 7600 service numbers. On the poster there is one service number listed in red - this is my grandfather's service number, who survived the war, which I feel gives the poster a number of different meanings. Overlaid in the centre of the poster is the ANZAC Emblem. Overall I was reasonably happy with the result, moreso because of the work I put in to getting the service numbers as opposed to the final result. I was a bit disappointed though that the judges would only accept an 800 x 1200 JPEG, because the text was unreadable at that size. It would make more sense to judge on a full size PDF.
