Wednesday 8 February 2017

OUGD603 - Collaborative Brief Meeting

Today I met with Charlotte from BA Illustration to discuss some important details of our upcoming collaborative brief which will explore the concept of educating children about the impact that humanity is having on the planet through the format of a series of children's story books. 

We devised a rough time plan for the brief in order to feel more organized and collected, agreeing to aim to have everything complete by the 10th of May. We thought that it would be sensible to set a long amount of time for this brief in order to do it justice. We want to be as ambitious as possible because we both feel passionate about the subject matter and feel that this project could potentially have a place in real world classrooms or children's book shops. 

We also arranged to meet at least once a week to help keep things ticking over. 

Initially, we both envisioned this project as being a singular publication. However, today we came up with the concept of producing a series of smaller books which would come packaged in a box of some description and work as a series of stories. I think this is a much better way to approach this brief, as it will ultimately break the information down into bite-size chunks which will hopefully be easier for the target audience of 5 -10-year-olds to understand. 


We outlined a number of wide-ranging areas/issues in which we want to address in the books:

Palm oil
Deforestation
Meat production
Overfishing
Throw-away-culture
Minimalist culture
Polar bears
Coral bleaching
Plastic
Buying locally

And then thought it would be appropriate to split the books into different environments, to make them less overwhelming for the audience to read:

Oceans: coral bleaching, overfishing, pollution, rising sea levels

Rainforests: stop buying palm oil, deforestation, cutting down on meat prevents desertification and meat-production

Urbanization: buying locally, consumerism, minimalist culture, waste

We then came up with the idea of embedding some sort of simplistic narratives into the books instead of making them purely factual and statistic based. This was always the loose plan, however, we both agreed that the books would benefit from inventing characters and universal storylines in order to appeal more to the target audience and their parents. 





OUGD603 - The Future Is Beautiful - Visual Research



János Hunor Vári - Flyer recycling project
https://www.behance.net/gallery/47424469/FLYER-RECYCLING



Ben Hutchings - Ghost Signs Project
https://www.behance.net/gallery/31215485/Ghost-Signs 

Graphic design inspiration – Chicago zine with experimental typography

Graphic design inspiration – Chicago zine with experimental typography

Graphic design inspiration – Chicago zine with experimental typography

Sofia Clausse - Chicago Zine Project 

Thursday 2 February 2017

OUGD603 - The Future is Beautiful - The Brief

This project intends to visually explore and represent the chaotic, unnerving and increasingly dystopian nature of our international political climate which is being warped, exaggerated and caricatured by global media on an hourly basis.

It will also aim to portray how information can become confused or misinterpreted in our age of mass media, ultimately interrogating how the average consumer of simple information can’t be blamed for feeling overwhelmed or disenfranchised by current affairs, especially someone such as myself, a 22 year old with very limited knowledge of politics.

The political leaders of the UK & USA, Trump & May, appear to be dominating the news at the moment, so I thought it would be interesting to focus in on the abundance of journalistic content being produced in response to their operations. 

The zine will explore the intense political climate through the use of traditional collage techniques and will utilise the dramatic and persuasive power of typographic abstraction. 
The Brief:

Produce an A4 lo-fi collage zine which aims to tackle the current political climate in the UK and USA in a uniquely playful and irreverent manner. In order to produce the zine, you will need to acquire content from secondary sources through conducting a simple Google search every day for a week. 

All you will need to do is type in 'Donald Trump' and 'Theresa May' and take the headline and any other relevant typographic content from the first result you see displayed on Google. Then, you will simply need to print off the content in monochrome and create collages which will be translated into the spreads of the zine. 

The zine will be printed on bulky newsprint at the scale of either A3 or A4 in order to mimic the aesthetic and feel of existing news publishing print. It is completely up to you how far you push the zine. You could just keep it as a stand-alone publication, or you could think of ways of pushing it further to be more than just a social commentary.