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.