Week 6

Whacked up brightness on poster 1, tidied up some detail on the ring (and remembered that it should have 4 white stripes lol), settled on a font and made it brighter so it would stand out. Test printed and then tidied up a little of the darkness and dropped the brightness of the ring back down as it was too bright and lost detail (although I kept the rest of the image lighter).

Rewrote text on poster 2, making it slightly thicker and increasing the gap between 'minimum' and 'wage' (as suggested), hopefully making it more legible. I lightened up the centre to push that focal point with the boat, and swapped the colour of text around (was originally red with cream outlines, now cream with red outline). Brightened up the sharks and redid the text on them too, and added an outline to the boat to hopefully make it stand out more.

Week 6

Painted up the waves for more detail, increased the darkness below, lifted the image so that the surface was a smaller part of the image to increase the ominous tone. Dropped the text below so that it would stand out, then played around a bit with the different fonts I could use. I'm happy with the tag line, but not sure what works best for the rest.

Lecturer suggests picking something simple to contrast with the illustration rather than trying to match it. Also up the text brightness so it stands out, and up the brightness in general because it prints out very dark which stops it being eye catching and makes stuff hard to immediately recognise.

Week 5

Development of poster. I flipped a shark like suggested, and changed the ring to a tiny row boat. I wanted to make the view from below but have trouble communicating that. I hand wrote the text to see if I could make it distressful by being scribbly and make it blend with the image style, and outlined it so that it would stand out. Then I flipped things horizontally because I felt it would read better than way and flow from top left to bottom right. Added more water motion lines. I got rid of the texture because that wasn't working, played around with colours a bit and ended up putting a halftone pattern in (looks better in real size) as I felt it added a bit of detail that was missing due to the block shapes. I wanted it to be more simple than my other poster though in terms of illustration.

Week 5

Some poster research, looking at visual style rather than rhetoric message. I was mostly looking for things using simple silhouettes, text/type with a hand written feel, and stuff relating to water. These are some of my favourite examples. High contrast is the easiest way to make it stand out, I particularly like red and blue as it is very striking, and I think I can use it to make my sharks stand out more and be more ominous. I'm also going to give a shot and hand drawing the text and try out that style.

Week 5 (interim 2)

Two posters I brought in for crit. The feedback was that the first is far more successful, although I might look at rearranging the type/fonts. The other had quite a negative response.

The font doesn't work at all, the tag line isn't prominent enough, one of the sharks should curve the other way for better flow, try repeating lettering in sharks... Also look at colour and tone as it lacks the ominous feel that is supposed to be connotated (which is successful in the other due to the darkness below). Redo water lines.

Lecturer suggested replacing the ring with a row boat to play with scale a bit, and also make sure it isn't too similar to the other design. She also thought the style of the first is perhaps too messy and makes it look incomplete.

Week 4

These two I brought in for class. Feedback suggests that the first is the more successful concept. It communicates easily, the text makes sense and the danger to the swimmer plays on pathos. The problem with the secondary one is that although it also uses pathos, the setting in the home confuses things by taking it away from the issue. A suggestion was to set it in a workplace instead, but I feel that I'd rather develop the first idea into two different posters.

Week 3 pt.2

Missed last class unfortunately. Here's a bit more of me experimenting with ideas though. It's all pretty rough but I'm trying to worry more about concept, as I think it's best not to waste hours drawing something up really pretty if I then decide to scrap it. There's a couple with the burger idea but I was having trouble with that, so I started thinking back to water/drowning again and what I could do with that.


Bonus John Key photoshopped onto a dragon I drew (I know it's stupid):

Week 3 Session 1 (interim 1)

4 A3 posters were presented for crit. Group picked my burger one as my best, thinking the plain background and simple image/text made it easily communicate and stand out. So, that was the one I left out for feedback.


What I got was mixed and ultimately contradictory. Some people liked the turn on 'less is more' and others didn't seem to get it or the relation. Some thought the message was clear, others didn't. Some though that the text wasn't necessary, but that would remove context and then it wouldn't be clear that it was about the minimum wage/living wage disparity. Some found the imagery didn't connect with the text or felt 'too busy'. Given the response I'm unsure it's my best one to move forward with. I've still doodled some new possible iterations of it.



I do still quite like my one with the yatch, but worry that I'm biased due to my like of illustration. The problem with this design is probably that it's very visually busy, and that may detract from the clarity of message and how it stands out. Also unsure how to develop it, but thought maybe a couple of people on the boat sunbathing or obviously relaxing and ignoring the people in the water.

These are my other two designs:


The thinking behind the first is that by giving a living wage you allow people the opportunity to grow/flourish, but a minimum wage leaves them stagnating and unhealthy/not getting anywhere. The other is fairly self explanatory, it's about how people in privilege have this idea that poor people should 'just work harder' without seeming to understand their own position where their financial standpoint carries them and poor people must constantly struggle and their financial limitations prevent them from ever catching up...

Week 2 session 2

More research.


We had some discussion in class about it, and different sorts of visual rhetoric. We were also set some exercises involving the rapid creation of ideas, which was actually quite helpful and allowed me to come up with a couple of new things, and asked to respond to other people's work, including how we would improve it.
Homework involves creating 4 A3 posters. I'm planning on two more illustrative ones and two with simple imagery. Obviously I'm not going to waste a lot of time on actual detailed illustration at this point as it'll be wasted if the idea is scrapped, or I need to rethink composition etc.

Week 2 session 1

Have continued to further my research into existing design presidents. What I have found is that in visual rhetoric, it tends to be the idea more than the actual layout that sells a piece. A very clever idea with simple design is far more effective than an elaborate and stylish composition with a vague or cliche idea behind it... that in itself makes this very challenging, as I find it very hard to think to think in that way, especially where signs and symbols are involved. I tend to prefer more literal illustration which really isn't going to work in my favour. I worry that if I rely on the perfect idea landing and it never does I'll do badly, but beyond brainstorming it's hard... I don't think ideas like that can be forced, all that can be done is generate many in the hopes that something will click...



But enough about that particular rant. Class this session ultimately proved my point, as we did many exercises where we were expected to generate ideas on our theme relating to a word or proverb. It's hard to twist your thoughts that way. Set with a chainsaw (how do you even draw chainsaws?!?) for the problem with low income, after many hopeless ideas I tried to draw a chainsaw destroying a clock in an effort to portray how low income means people are forced to destroy all their time for money. I'm not happy with it and I don't think it's effective but I honestly don't know what else to do.

Week 1

Another paper, another blog. The first session was more or less about introducing us to the topic and visual rhetoric. We were tasked with researching equality/inequality in New Zealand, which would spawn a verbal debate.
Our group was given inequality and we split the research so we could focus on specific points that interested us, mine being income inequality, or the minimum wage vs. the living wage. Since it's a topic I feel strongly about I though it was a good idea to look into as it may well be what I decide to do my final posters on.
We also looked at mind mapping in order to expand our ideas and generate more.
As well as that, we were split into pairs and tasked with creating two rough poster mock-ups on inequality/equality.