#l5 sic

[uwaisshahbcu-blog]

Pointed out some test graphics for the button box to measure for size and final finish

[akashclairbcu-blog]

EVALUATION

For this project I had to pick a charity or issue I felt passionately about, and create an appropriate communication tool to tell people why my charity or issue exists, which will then be exhibited at the Walk In My Shoes exhibition at the end of the project. 

At the start I was stuck on finding a charity or issue, as I was not sure on which was most interesting and the best to take forward as something which I was passionate about. I came up with a variety of different ideas from environmental issues to animal cruelty and homelessness. I picked the two which meant something to me and I wanted to raise awareness about, and started to brainstorm initial ideas for each and  pick the best option. In the end I chose Shelter, as I wanted to get a message across to the public that this is a very important issue and people do not know enough about why people are homeless.

I had now picked a charity and the next step was to start thinking of the right approach to take in ensuring that I had a powerful campaign to make an impact at the exhibition. So, I started to brainstorm certain ideas I had such as information posters, surveys, sculptures and more.

My target audience for this project was people from the age of 16-40, but also people who do not know about homelessness as a worldwide issue, as well as just raising awareness for the issue. This audience research helped me better understand how to design and layout my visuals to effectively reach and impact the audience.

My other research consisted of practitioners and companies who raise awareness for homelessness. I looked at various companies such as Shelter, Raising the Roof, ADOT, Depaul and more. This research helped a lot as I gained knowledge on how they inform their audience about the issue and how their campaign sells and persuades the viewer, and also the effect it has on them. Their advertisements and posters also gave me an insight to some initial design ideas for my information poster idea. I also researched some vital practitioners who inspired my design concepts and my overall approach. I was most inspired by Nicholas Felton, who designs infographic posters and Lee Jeffries, a street photographer who focuses on homeless people. They had a massive impact on my initial design ideas and sparked ideas which became my finals.

After my research, I decided to focus more on homelessness as an issue instead of using the charity Shelter, as I felt passionately about homelessness as a whole and wanted to bring the issue to the audience instead of a charity or organisation.

I developed all my ideas by producing a lot of thumbnails and initial sketching. By choosing this method, I got all the ideas in my head on paper rather than designing straight in Illustrator. This helped me get more ideas and inspired more to come.

Next I went out to start taking photos of homeless people for my profiles, I started out by doing full body shots and when I got back and checked them out I came up with an idea to have a full body shot as well as close ups. So, I went out for a second time to get close ups, and this is where the Lee Jeffries style inspiration came in, as I focused on keeping that style of photography to really capture the emotion and expressions of the person.

As I was drawing out thumbnails, an idea came to my head which was to create homeless people profiles and get people to write their backstories. I then started to draw out designs and approaches to how I could make this idea a final for my exhibition. I ended up choosing this instead of the infographic posters.

For my profile posters, I wanted to create something which was serious when read but fun and exciting which bought out the creativity in people when they thought about the backstories. So, I decided that the design would be clean and simple with a powerful image which would immediately catch the audiences attention. I started mocking up four different design concepts for each profile to see which looked best and which suited the theme, creating design compositions to see which fitted and picking the one which created a serious and creative atmosphere.

The editing process for the rest of poster such as the title and information took a lot of time as some of the designs looked too busy as their was too much on the page, and this made me cancel out a variety of different ideas which I thought were my best concepts. I overcame this obstacle by asking fellow class mates on their thoughts and ideas on how to pursue a certain design. This helped me a huge amount as it sparked some new, better ideas, which would come out as finals.

In conclusion, I think everything turned out to be successful and I worked well to ensure I kept to a time plan, create ideas and visuals which all kept to the same theme and created a positive impact on the audience for my exhibition, as a lot of people got involved and interacted with my exhibition piece. I also think that I worked well to create an event which met all of my initial targets to raise awareness for homelessness and have an outcome which has an impact and brings out creativity within my audience. If I were to do this project again, I would try and take it further by making a zine or another tool with my sticky notes responses. 

[charlottebennett-l5-bcu-blog]

Evaluation/ Personal Reflection

For this project I had to create a communication tool for a charity of my choice. The purpose of this was to create awareness of the charity and explain their workings to the audience. My work had to be evocative enough to get people talking about the tool and therefore the charity and was to be showcased in an exhibition at the end of the project. The charity I chose was The Donkey Sanctuary and my final concept was to create a 3D model of a donkey-taxi to showcase the mistreatment of donkeys as a global issue.          The audience I was designing for was fairly broad. I was trying to reach out to people who were unaware of The Donkey Sanctuary but by using the sanctuary’s existing marketing language and approach. I didn’t want to make an emotional campaign because I feel our culture is very desensitized to them so they are, nowadays, extremely ineffective. I thought this would also be an obvious approach that would be seen as an easy, quick solution to the problem. I wanted to challenge myself; perhaps in mediums I had yet to experiment in. Although, my main target audience was people in jobs – who were in a position to donate to the charity. On saying this however, I knew my work had to be sensitive to a wider age range as there was a chance it would be going into a public exhibition. The possibility that children could be viewing my work meant that I didn’t want to include items that were graphically disturbing.            I visited The Donkey Sanctuary in Sutton to get a more solid idea of their advertising language and see how they really kept and cared for their donkeys. This really helped my project as I got a better feel of how they want to talk to people. Their work & marketing at the sanctuary – as well as the promotion, design, adverts that are out in the public – is very conversational. It tries to speak to a wide audience (more so possibly at the sanctuary) to also get children involved in helping the donkeys. I believe this is so they can grow up knowing that these are loving creatures and they are aware of how to look after them so that hopefully generations to come will be less likely to abuse donkeys.          Ignoring their video content, the emotional factor in the design work is kept very subtle. I feel the charity know that pushing overly emotional content will only drive people away. Similarly to my design work, their first incentive is to create work that informs the viewer that this abuse is happening, and where. I wanted to carry this concept further by illustrating what abuse is happening and creating a catalyst for change.          The illustrator Ryan Brinkerhoff started the metaphorical ideas generation ball rolling. I liked the way he would display his thought and design process as well as his designs for physical spaces. At this point in the project I wasn’t sure where I wanted to go but I knew I wanted to make something physical, to create something new and different to The Donkey Sanctuary’s current promotional materials and to hopefully stand a better chance of standing out in the exhibition. In this project I personally felt it was important to push myself in directions I hadn’t really gone before to improve on weaknesses and broaden my skillset in general.            I was influenced by the artist Gail Armstrong. Her paper sculptures were really inspiring me to and helped inform me of how to make my model more stable, as well as visually stimulating. Although I didn’t use found objects like Armstrong, I did carry her methods through in my work; such as layering materials or reprinting them onto thicker materials to make them stronger. I did this through layering thick card in paper mache and then partly in fur. I was also influenced particularly by her Kleenex piece from 2010. I feel seeing work that was designed to live in a specific space helped me to stop and think about what I was designing and how I needed to change my designs to suit that space. For example, make the model more durable if it wasn’t in a cabinet, or use brighter colours if it’s a poster on the wall, to try and get the audience’s attention first.                    The technical skills I used were more hands-on. As I said, I wanted to try something I hadn’t done before and so I created a model out of card, paper mache and fur. This was a really fun experience and I learnt a lot, not just about model making, but planning properly. My first “proper model” wasn’t successful because the clay cracked when I dried it too quickly. I then paper mache’d over this in an attempt to fix this. Even though I did lose 5 vital days due to the deadline being brought forward, I feel better planning would have meant I could have finished the initial model to a higher standard. I do not blame my work not getting in to the exhibition purely on the deadline change, as I know I did not produce my best work. I should have created a more solid time scale of when things needed to be done and factored in time for the model to dry.          I used Photoshop for the road signage. I was a lot more comfortable in this medium and I thought it would be good to use a mix of my strengths as well as experimentation. I was really happy with the aesthetic of the outcome as I felt it looked really realistic. Close up shots of the image, to me, looked like a real road surface, which is why I believe the LOOK of my road surface graphic was successful.            The Donkey Sanctuary’s existing advertising helped me a lot throughout this project. I liked how they would often use slogans of some sort to start a conversation with the viewer. This can be seen in their booklets to advertise visiting their sanctuaries. It would be split in to two sections, a more jovial statement; “Psssst” then to a command or comment; “Tell us what you think”. This is accompanied by an extreme close of a donkey’s ear. I also liked their packaging design, which was very subtle and would use inanimate objects to hint at the shape of a donkey – usually their ears as these are very recognisable. I wanted to comment on donkeys’ looks and behaviours but in a visual way, firstly, as this would attract the audience’s attention more. I believed that creating an installation piece would be more successful as it would get more viewings and word of mouth alone could help spread the knowledge about the piece and the charity. It is more interesting as I feel posters for charities are everywhere and I wanted to create something that would truly “get under the audience’s skin” by creating something large and in their face that they were forced to create an understanding for. This belief and idea was helped by the lecture on Gestalt Theory by Paul Procter. As humans, our brains are forced to create meaning for something through the theories of Multi-stability and Reification. I felt in order to create piece that would get talked about and promote the charity I should do something that relates to these theories. The audience wasn’t given all of the information so that they would both have to learn and begin to understand the mistreatment of donkeys, or they would just walk away.          This theory was tested in the feedback I got from a survey I created. There was a clear divide between those who would be intrigued by seeing this installation in the environment (taxi bay) and other would simply walk away and not want to learn more about the piece. I feel my concept and model were successful because the positive feedback I got was that people wanted to interact with the taxi, whether this was through excitement or pure curiosity. This would generate talk and sharing on social sites that would raise awareness of the charity and the mistreatment. The large ears of the donkey – which I designed so that it would be easily recognisable as a donkey – were perceived as comical by many. But this worked in my favour as it attracted them to the piece and created a bond between the viewer and the piece which meant they were more willing to learn more about the purpose. A common point people made was that they wanted to “get in and ride it”. I feel this could have been a really good selling point for this installation as this would have generated even more publicity and excitement. I have seen this through experience with ride simulators in Birmingham city centre. For example, a Top Gear ride had hundreds of people flock to it to see what it was about but also have an enjoyable and memorable time.          In contrast to this, I got feedback saying that people would not want to interact with this piece. The main reasoning for this was that it wasn’t “friendly” looking. However, I didn’t want my model to look friendly or happy as that would give out the wrong message. I wanted to depict that the donkeys have to endure long working days with poor care. If I had created a happy looking donkey this would have signified that the donkeys liked this.          I feel the graphics I produced were less successful. This is partly due to the presentation of them in the real life space. I wanted to use them as a gorilla marketing tool; painted on the floor near the existing taxi bays, to merge this piece in to everyday life. I felt this was necessary to illustrate that this is a common occurrence and isn’t just left to foreign countries. I also wanted to comment on how we, the public, are the answers to change how these animals are treated; by either becoming more knowledgeable on how donkeys are cared for by owner before riding them, or donating to the charity. I felt this was said through the face that the text was in an ordinary place that we can all access Meaning that the message can be seen by more people. Feedback I got suggested that I make the floor graphics into a poster as it was more likely people would see them. I can appreciate this comment and do think I became a little too interested in making this installation fit neatly into the “real life environment”. I feel this is due to the quote that inspired my work: “Good comedy is to have a surreal character in an everyday situation, or visa versa”. I really wanted to fit the surreal-ness of the donkey-taxi in to a more real environment so that it would stimulate questions.          Overall I feel my work was successful even though it didn’t get in to the exhibition because it created a starting point for people to question what my work was and invited them to go over a look, which many people wanted to. However, I feel I should have worked on more touch points for the concept to be accessed “offline” away from the installation site. I feel this is something I can work on in my next project – accessibility and mediums. I should have experimented more with my floor graphics and come up with more outcomes.  

[chelsealpritchard-blog1]

MY INTENTIONS

How I was going to go about making this book was to tear out the books pages, print my pages on single spreads so that each page can fit on 1 piece of A3 paper which is what I bought ( even though the original idea was to fit each spread onto 1 piece of A3 but the book arrived too big). I was then going to potentially sand down the bumpy areas on the book cover so that my work could fit neatly onto it and them glue my pages in together using the glue gun.

This sounded like such an easy task for me but it was actually quite a time consuming job.

[chelsealpritchard-blog1]

DILEMMAS - SOME SET BACKS AND QUESTIONS.

Before anything, I was silly not to check the size of the book as I just assumed it would be an average size. The book arrived and it was massive. It also had bumpy glittery gel on the cover so this will be something I will have to be aware of when I attach my artwork to the cover of the book. A few setbacks butI had to work with it.

Tip: DON’T BE FOOLED BY THE IMAGE AND ALWAYS CHECK DIMENSIONS BEFORE YOU BUY.

How am I going to create my book? 

Can the printers at Uni print double sided which the images exaclty on top of each other like a real page?

WhIch pages with be on the back of another?

How will I print the book cover, back and spine onto this book without it looking tacky? Sticker paper?

[samvere-blog]

Personal Reflection Report

 The brief as I understand it was to choose a charity or issue that I feel passionate about and produce a communication tool that will raise awareness of the chosen charity or their cause(s).

Through research and development I was expected to design something that gets under people’s skin and provokes a response in favour of the charity. The aim was to produce a final piece that is worthy of being displayed in a gallery/public space amongst other similar works.  My chosen charity was Greenpeace as I am passionate about the natural world and their campaigns are close to my heart. Greenpeace has a broad range of campaigns which I decided would be too broad for my project so I made my choice more specific and decided to focus on the deforestation of tropical rainforests. This is a huge on-going campaign with little media coverage and something that I am greatly concerned about, this is why I chose this area to focus my work on.   My research mostly consisted of existing charity campaigns, scientific research materials I found on the internet, documentaries and articles found on the Greenpeace website and other similar websites. I also have a good memory of relevant imagery used in charity campaigns that I have seen in the media, these have been equally influential to my work. Not only did I look at previous campaigns from Greenpeace but I also looked ones from similar charities such as WWF and sanctuary, as well as studying the typographer Jean Francois Porchez.  Some of the best ideas I came up with would probably be the use of popular food products being advertised as a cause of deforestation. I thought this would be particularly effective because it shocks people with the realisation that they are contributing to deforestation. I also think that one of my best ideas was the one that developed into my final piece. It was to make a video of a peaceful looking rainforest with an innocent Jaguar in the middle of it, the video would then take a dark turn when the reality of deforestation is introduced and the threat for the rainforest animals is revealed. I feel that it is most effective because people are much more compassionate towards animals than they are to trees. Showing people that animals are effected, not just the trees, makes the situation more upsetting to the audience and thus provokes more of a response.  Before choosing a final idea to produce I had to choose a selection of my many ideas develop. This was to get an idea of what would be most eye catching and effective. Development mostly consisted of sketching out my ideas, for certain ideas that I thought were most effective I went a little further and made models and digital mock-ups of how they might look as finished pieces. This helped me to decide what I would like to use as my final design. Soon after deciding to develop my rainforest video Idea I gathered the resources and tools to make it. I chose to build a model and buy a toy jaguar that I could video, this is partially due to the fact I have no access to a real rainforest but mostly because I liked the Idea of a naive looking model that could be a child’s toy, it makes it all the more innocent. Innocence was the key as I planned on contrasting it with the dark reality of the effects of deforestation. The model was mostly made out of paper maché, spray paint and acrylic paint. I also included some real plants and mushrooms to make the model more realistic and make it feel more like an actual rainforest. I hadn’t used these modelling methods for a very long time so I had to re-learn the different techniques when making my model. The hardest parts were lighting my model to make it seem realistic and recording the video. I aimed to light the model as a real rainforest would be lit, to do this I used a dim green light along with some small white lights and a dimmed tungsten light, they were tweaked and positioned until I got them how I liked them. I have little experience with video but I used what I knew about photography to help me set the camera which was a Canon 7D digital SLR. Through a lot of experimentation with angles and focal points I produced a variety of useable footage which I then took into Adobe Premiere Pro CC to edit. Using this software I selected the best footage and put it together, I also added music, sound effects, text and the Greenpeace logo.  The most successful parts of this project for me were finding plenty of relevant research, the building of the model and the overall concept of my final piece. I found myself doing more research in this project than previous projects due to the ease of sharing websites and videos on my tumblr blog whenever I found them. Considering I hadn’t used paper maché for years, I managed to create some fairly realistic tree trunks. At times I was unsure as to how it would look finished so I made sure that every time I made an alteration to the model I looked at it through the camera and took a few photos to check that it looked right. I think I successfully used innocence and contrast to create a video with shock factor, the harsh sound of a chainsaw and tree falling especially gets under the skin of the audience.  The main thing that I think was unsuccessful with my project is the execution of the video. My problem is that the image is too shaky and that also makes it less clear. This instability is because I was filming such a small scale model that made the smallest of movements seem large, I should have hired some equipment to help make the camera move smoothly. I also would have liked to have recorded my own sounds but I have been quite limited so I had to find them online and edit them myself. I feel that the ideas I developed were good but could have been developed further and I would have liked to produce either an information booklet or a poster to accompany the video. In future I will make sure I hire the required equipment when shooting a video and I will better organise my time management so that I have time to include extra items to accompany my final piece.

[chelsealpritchard-blog1]

NO SHOWTIME FOR ME.

The reason I was not put up in the show is because my book was not ready. I planned to get my book printed through Blurb.com but they needed 7-10 days to print it which is time I did not have. Therefore, I wasn’t able to be featured in the show as I only had a poster left to show and no props to use e.g iPad to show off my book.

[olgashurakova-blog]

Personal Reflection Report

For this project we were firstly ask to choose a particular charity that would be of interest to us and then produce any kind of communication ‘tool’ that would tell everyone why that charity exists. After looking at a number of charities I have found one that was particularly interesting called The Wildlife Trust. However, before I could start my project what I had to do was to read a bit more information about that charity in order to build up my background knowledge. Therefore, I went on and explored the charity website, read news report about The Wildlife Trust and had a look at what people had to say about it.

To be fair at the start of the project I was not sure where I should take this project, however, after we had a semiology lecture and I was introduced to an artist called Rene Magritte I have started to form a clearer idea of how I should go about this project. However, even then I was still in doubt about what I should do and which style of work I should follow, therefore, I have carried an in-depth research into a number of graphic designers/ artists/photographers and also their style of working in order to help me to come up with an idea. I have also looked at some work that I personally found very inspirational and looked at the ways that I could possibly adapt their style and look.

Probably the best idea that I have come up with was the idea of showing how the world looks now and how it might look in the future if people were not to take responsibility for their actions. The reason why I know that this was a good idea was because it kept popping up in my sketchbook in a different form each time yet the message always remained the same of how something looks now and how it would look in the future.

Ok, so I have a basic idea in mind but that was not enough, since I didn’t want to produce just a couple of posters, therefore, I have started to look at how I might develop this idea further. After carrying out research into The Last Of Us game, I thought that instead of just producing printable poster I should create a digital poster which would fade between before and after images. I really liked that idea since that way instead of placing two poster next to each other they could be displayed on one screen. However, even with this idea in mind I felt that it was not enough and after speaking to my tutor I came up with an idea to produce a holiday pack which would advertise a holiday to the future of the UK. I felt that this was a very strong idea since it is something that have not been done before.

During this project I have collaborate with a photography student who provided me with photographs of UK scenery and landscape, which I have used as ‘before’ images. However, the problem that I was faced with was deciding how I should go about producing the ‘after’ images since I did not have much experience in editing photographs in Photoshop at an advanced level. YouTube was the main resource of advanced Photoshop tutorials that I have used, yet I knew that the quality of work comes from an experience, therefore, I have decided to do a test version on my final outcome first. I would not say that the test version was brilliant, but I was quite proud of it since I felt that I have learned something from this experience and that although the quality might have been not up to the industry standard it brought the message across very well of what I was trying to achieve.

Alongside the production stage I was doing some research and that is when I have stumbled upon a very interesting person called Hugo Barros who combined two styles of working, which I thought would never go together i.e. surrealism and collage. After looking at his work I thought that if I can’t reach perfection in advanced Photoshop editing skills then why not try adapting his style of working and in the end that is what I did.

Editing photographs, however, was one thing but another thing that I had to do was to put all of them together into a) poster format and b) holiday brochure format. In order to achieve that I have used Adobe Indesign, a program that I have learned during the first year at university and the one that I feel quite comfortable working in.

 Overall, I believe that during this project I had a number of successes and failures, but even at times where I didn’t do things as good or where my ideas did not come out the way I wanted them to, I was able to learn a number of valuable lessons. So first thing first the thing that I am most proud of and I feel was very successful was my idea and a whole concept of this project. Maybe the final outcome was not as good but I really believe that this idea has potential of being developed a bit more and refined. I cannot stress enough how glad I am that I choice this idea, because I really believe that what I have created for this project is very unique, interesting and fulfils the aim of this brief very well. The thing that was probably not as successful was the production stage since I didn’t really have enough advanced skills to create an outcome that would look very professional and up to industry standard. However, I have still learnt quite a lot of Photoshop skills, which I intend to use afterwards. Another thing that I feel was quite successful was the fact that during this project I have experimented with the style that I have previously have not touched upon and even thought about. In the end, even though the final outcome did not turn out looking that great I am glad that I have decided to experiment. The reason for that is because, now I know that surrealism and collage is not really my thing and I can go and explore other graphic design styles, until eventually I find a style that I would like and be comfortable at working in.

If I were to do this project again, I would probably maintain the same idea and concept of this project, but created the final outcome in a different style, which would probably look a bit cleaner, rather than sticking with surrealism and collage style. However, apart from that I would not change anything, because as I have said this a number of times, I am very proud of my idea.