University Park, Pa. -- Penn State graphic design student Courtney Christopher recently won first prize in the Third World Biennial of Student Poster, an international poster competition for undergraduate and graduate students sponsored by the University of Novi Sad and the Academy of Arts in Novi Sad, Serbia. She won for her series of three posters on anti-smoking, which she designed as part of a graphic design technology course taught by Fang Chen, associate professor of graphic design.
The assignment was to create a poster containing a hybrid of two separate, unrelated images that, when combined, created a new meaning. Each of Christopher's posters shows a picture of a person's feet, as they would appear on a table in a morgue, with a toe tag resembling a cigarette package. "I created a series of three posters to both emphasize the number of people smoking kills, and to suggest that these bodies are not identified by their names, but rather by the brands of cigarettes that led to their deaths."