Rationale

 222258 Design Studio IIB

Donald and Andre

Lauren Hynd, 19032596

Rationale

These posters use visual rhetoric to raise awareness for New Zealanders living in period poverty. Period poverty is when a person cannot afford sanitary products, which can lead to them having to choose food over period items, using unhygienic alternatives and/or missing school or work. The target audience is anyone who has never experienced period poverty, whether they don’t have periods, or the price doesn’t impact their lives. I have shown the importance of this issue by juxtaposing tampons with chips, which utilises pathos as the exaggerated idea of mixing food and sanitary items makes people recoil in disgust. The relatability to New Zealand can be seen with the common phrase ‘cheap as chips’ as well as the classic chips in paper in my second poster. This concept uses dynamism to activate the diagonal movement of the eye, whereas the first poster focuses the eye on the central image. The first also uses pastiche to mimic the design style of a fast food advertisement, which captures the attention of the viewer.

Week 6

 Finalising Edits

I did stick with the edits that I did on the first concept last week as after leaving them for a couple of days I realised that it does actually work.

This is the final alignment that I went with. I think it looks even better printed.

Overall I am pretty pleased with the work I have produced, but like always I feel like with more time I could've done better. I think my concept is strong but I could work on the way I visually communicate this, mainly with the images and illustrations I chose.

Week 5.2

 Interim 2

These were the posters I presented for the second interim.

The feedback that I decided to listen to from this page were the comments that said try flipping the tampon, as well as moving some of the body copy up to become subtext and making the chip packet look more 3D. I may also try the tomato sauce idea for the fish and chips poster.

Overall I'm feeling quite comfortable with my work and only have a few small things to try/change.

Edits

Here I am trying to figure out how to get some subtext up onto the poster without ruining the entire composition.

I ended up with this version of it. None of them are making me super happy but I do think that it is important to not bury this fact in my body copy.

Here I tried flipping the tampon upside down. I did try tucking it into the chip packet but I didn't like that at all.

Reverting back to the right way up tampon but flipping it so that the string was on the other side. Ellie suggested this to me because of the way her eyes move across the poster. After she pointed it out I realised that she was right and that I do agree with her.

Putting the subtext onto the chip packet. Again I'm unsure about this, but I can't figure out if it's because I don't want to change my poster that I'm already happy with or because it actually isn't working.

Week 5.1

First Concept

Today's main focus was reworking the first cheap as chips poster that I made last week. The first thing that I did was change the background to make it more of a gradient/vignette radiating outwards from the centre.

I really don't know which tool is the best one to use to make this sort of thing so I actually just used different tones of red and the brush tool to make this which I'm sure is the most time consuming way possible. It pretty much worked though.

I quickly chucked it into my current poster on indesign to see what it would look like and I'm pretty happy with it.

I'm not very good at illustrator at all but I wanted a nice vector image of some chips so I hopped in here and did my best with it. It actually turned out better than I thought it would.

I thought of what Donald said about combining different mediums and I didn't want to draw a tampon again considering I painted one for my other poster. 

I wasn't sure how to colour an image on illustrator so I took my outline into photoshop and then used the brush tool to fill in all the pieces. I did the chips all slightly different colour variations which I think was a good call as it lends to a more natural look.

Playing with placement of the heading.

I wasn't so keen on the blue so I tried out a whole bunch of different colours as well as making the size of the chip packet slightly smaller.

I also rounded the corners after this one as the sharp edges just didn't look right.

I settled on this really light pink as I think the tampon contrasts nicely with it and it doesn't get lost on the background. At this point I was thinking the background was too bright so the next few images are of me changing the colour of the background slightly, as well as thinking about the title and emphasis. This is the first poster that I will be showing for interim this Thursday.

Second Concept

After finally purchasing some chips I was then able to make the changes to my other poster. I took some photos of the chips with my camera. I also tried the idea of putting a tampon actually in with the chips (I didn't think this would work but I did it just in case I changed my mind later on).

I then took the photo I liked into Photoshop, selected just the paper and added a few adjustments to make it look a bit grungy.

After Photoshop it was time to bring it into InDesign where it would just replace the spot of my previous image.

This is the poster I decided to go with for the interim. I'm pretty happy with this so it will be interesting to see what feedback I receive on Thursday. The one thing I would change about this would be to make the photo even more grungy and distorted, to really play on that emotive quality of being cheap and dirty.

This was another trial of subtext placement although I don't think this really works.

Week 4.2

 In Class

In class today I continued working on the fish and chips poster. I was feeling instantly much more inspired and I found that the ideas flowed to me quickly, and I didn't go through many iterations at all until I found one that I liked.

This took me a good hour to get to a standard I was happy with, then I tiled and printed at A1. 

The feedback I received was mainly good which I'm pleased about as I was feeling pretty lost. My feedback was to make the title bigger, the body copy smaller as well as removing the overrule, to photograph actual chips so that I wasn't using 3 different mediums (photography, gestural paint strokes, digital drawing), and maybe to integrate the tampon more into the pile of chips rather than just sitting on top.  I also need to make the logo of the client white, and sit it underneath the body copy or in line with it so it feels like it relates to the text and isn't just sitting weirdly by itself. Donald also didn't think the paper actually looks like the paper you'd get your chips in, even though it is so maybe I could do something different with it when I take the next photograph.

The background texture was working for Andre as he liked the way it related to the word 'cheap'. It reminded him of concrete floors, and sitting on the floor to eat fish and chips. For me it reminds me of the mess of eating chips from paper, especially with the tomato sauce and crumbs going everywhere. All in all I think this poster is working well, and now I need to go back and fix up my previous chips poster. 

Week 4: Lab

In today's lab we looked at tiling our posters ready for hand in, as well as getting the booklet up to date. I updated my citations for each of the posters I have done so far.

Week 4.1

In Class

In today's class we had a small critique of everyone's posters. I had printed out the tampon sandwich poster as this is the one that most people, including Andre liked the most last week.

To expand on the idea of adding sanitary products to food I did a quick brainstorm of other foods I could use for this. I came up with hot chips, carrots, popsicles, ice creams, pizza, and takeaway fizzy drinks. I also came up with a few variations on the title. 'A choice no one should have to make', 'periods are not a choice', and 'an impossible choice, period.'

I began working on the idea of the packet of hot chips with a tampon in them. I sourced my image from Unsplash like usual. 

Photo by Miguel Andrade on Unsplash

In photoshop I quickly masked everything from the image except for the packet of chips. I added a few adjustments to this to make it less orange, and more distorted (I used posterize for this). On top of the image I drew a tampon, to make it look like it was in the packet of chips too. I exported to InDesign to start putting text onto the poster.

Here I added in some red paint speckles for some texture.

Playing with the colours to try to make the tampon stand out more.

Same title as the previous poster.

Paint specks and new title.

Blue colours and different title placement. Here I was struggling to think of any new ideas, then I remembered the lecture this morning about how one of the people had modelled their poster on an old cigarettes ad. I decided to see if any of the McDonalds ads would give me any inspiration.

This poster did actually inspire me with the red background, and white lower case text which was centered above the image. I also tried to do the gradient background but couldn't get this bit right so gave up.

Red background and shadow.

Changing the position of the shadow to correspond better with the highlights and shadows of the original image.

Trying different text placement.

Coming up with a more catchy title and adding in the other text. This is the poster I submitted.

The rest of the posters are just me playing around with different ways of having the title.

Another Concept

I had the idea of making a poster more interesting by creating some text/images/marks away from the computer. To begin with I painted a tampon black and tried to make a stamp out of this on a piece of paper. This didn't really work as I envisioned it, but I still liked the outcome.

I still wanted to create the outline or shape of a tampon with paint so I did this just with a paintbrush and very few brushstrokes. Again I liked the outcome.

One more thing I wanted to do with my paint was to write the title/heading in my own handwriting. I tried this out using my normal handwriting, and then again using a more fluid, loose style of writing.

This was the loose handwriting.

This is my normal handwriting, just with paint not ink.

I also got out my alphabet stamps and wrote the title in stamps and ink just in case it looked cool, and worked with my poster. I wasn't so sure about this, but I thought I might as well try it.

After I did all this mark making, I then moved onto photography. I had some newsprint paper lying around that I knew would work for my idea of making it look like fish and chips. I scrunched this up and then took a photo with my camera.

In photoshop I selected just the paper, then distorted the image to make it look more interesting. I also drew some chips onto the paper. At this point I really hadn't thought much about what I wanted them to look like in the end, I just wanted to get my idea out there.

This was all I got in indesign on this day. I wasn't feeling very creatively inspired but I decided to leave it here rather than pushing for something that I could tell wasn't going to happen easily today.