crit

The crit today was useful, i went with 2 briefs because I couldn't decide which one to do or whether to do them both but make them less work each. One was to promote a local organisation, i got a list of community organisations and i was going to do a logo and promotion for one called Pyramid of Arts, which is a workshop for kids with learning disabilities. My second one is for the Tropical River project in Hull which is my Dad's project and i will do a logo, illustrations for exhibition panels and the T-Shirts for the staff. Everybody agreed that it looked like i wanted to do this one more and also it gives me more work to do and more chance to do illustration than if i did the other one. I have been looking at a guy called Michael Bartalos who has done illustrations for the California Academy of sciences. He did illustrations to represent the different zones in the exhibition and these were applied to merchandise.

Luba Lukova

I have been reading a book called 'Good: an introduction to ethics in graphic design', and its been really useful for my design context. One of the designers whose work features in it is Luba Lukova, an illustrator who does a lot of work highlightng social, political and cultural issues. These illustrations are from 'Social Justice', a set of 12 posters based around these themes. The Health Coverage poster was in a prestigious exhibit at the Inauguration of President Obama in Washington. She uses strong visual metaphors to represent the subject (written underneath) but using very simple imagery. It is very easy to understand the message in each one. I really like her because its more her ideas that are key to this work and I enjoy doing that in my work. This has made me not be able to decide (again) what to do after Easter because I think this kind of stuff suits me better, like the Guardian postcards I did, rather than my other idea of promoting a community organisation and doing a logo etc. Hmmm.

Progress and evaluation of Dove brief

I decided that what i did for the dove brief before was only showing one idea of beauty and seeing as though the aim is to broaden stereotypical views thought there should be more. So i expanded this idea and asked some lovely ladies what beauty meant for them and they said things like individuality, happiness, confidence in yourself and being natural. So I made a set of four cheesy ads using these four ideas of beauty and an image to represent these. I think they work much better now as a set because the images before were not really communicating individuality very well and the captions at the bottom i think work well now.
i did a few variations using blues and skin tones and printed them on 12 different papers. i was interested to see how the white bits - the shiny diamond in particular - would show up on a newsprint as these ads are for all press formats. I am now going to choose the best stocks to print each one on for the final ads. I have decided that they will be either one or two-colour prints but not using black because i want them to look gentle.
I don't think this response answers the brief because ive ignored the whole point of the brief which was to show images of disability in advertising. im a bit annoyed with myself for changing this brief because i was meant to be doing one just as it is.i did have another idea which would have fit in with what it wanted but i don't have the resources to get the photographs of people that i would need, and also i wanted to draw. I think if i'd spent more time on this brief i would have made the drawings look nicer because they are all quite gross apart from diamondy. I haven't really looked at any design to inform this which i should have but i wanted it to be really simple to fit in with Dove's values.
This brief has fit in with my design context because the message Dove are trying to promote goes against the trend in advertising at the moment. They have had a run of adverts showing 'real' women whilst other cosmetic companies continued to use the conventional, stereotypical 'ideal' image of beauty, making women who see these adverts feel inferior as they compare themselves to the young, airbrushed models and this can have very negative effects on women. This is why i saw this as socially responsible.

Revised Statement of Intent

I updated my statement of intent for the group tutorial today, everything in red is what i have added. it was a useful tutorial because it made me think more about what i want to do after Easter and it helped me understand how my theme, design context and blog help to tie everything together. The main thing that has changed is how i have broadened the type of work that i want to do as i have learnt that socially responsible design is more than just campaigns for social issues. Im a bit worried that i haven't really been investigating a process like most people e.g. illustration and print.
I need to write what I am going to after Easter, including a brief written out with a clear subject and deliverables. I also need to think about the book or whatever im making for design context and start sifting through the research ive got to make up the content. I think i might do the chapters on the main things i have learnt. These would be:

• Clients
• Visual language of good
• Community
• Campaigns
• Balance (conclusion)