Original images courtesy of Stock.xchng

The use of online stock image libraries such as Stock Exchange can save an enormous amount of time.

The additional time-consuming jobs in this instance would have been as follows:

• Take a photograph of a passport.

• Scan a page from the passport.

• Find a suitable model willing to appear in the poster (without recompense).

• Go to the airport and take a shot of a plane taking off.

With the addition of the design stage of the poster, this agenda would have turned a two hour job into a full day's work.
Without recourse to online libraries or expensive collections of stock images many design features would be omitted or severely compromised.

Even trawling through your own image collection is unlikely to yield the wealth of variety that you can find on a web site that is augmented by hundreds of contributed images every day.

With strict new regulations regarding the introduction of biometric passport photographs, many people are finding it difficult of acquire an acceptable UK passport picture. This poster was created to encourage people to avail themselves of the facilities of a particular shop that guaranteed the integrity of their photographs. The poster was subsequently used by other photography establishments.

• The background is a scan from a passport page.

• The plane was easily masked in seconds from its blue sky background.

• The flags are easily acquired by utilizing any online search engine and are obviously copyright free. (As flags carry a fair amount of political weight they are best arranged with this in mind rather than according to their colour peculiarities).

• The colour scheme was based upon the necessity of having a UK passport as the main element while the foreground colours are necessarily separated either by increased contrast in relation to the background or relatively high saturation. The foreground elements represent the message of the poster and need to be popped in this way so that the message is not hidden within the design.

• The subject of the photograph had to be altered in order to subdue her smile which is contrary to the new guidelines determined by the passport office. Altering actual passport photographs is, of course, forbidden.