DESIGN CONTEXT

Thursday, 17 April 2014

OUGD503 Responsive: Collaborative design for kids.

OUGD503

RESPONSIVE

COLLABORATIVE

DESIGN FOR KIDS

As we have settled on the target audience of children, but neither of us have experience of designing for children we decided to have a look in to some design for children. We wanted to avoid cliche, uneducated design, aided by the use of comic sans and focus on a sophisticated, well designed yet friendly and fun design for kids. Here are some examples of child friendly design:

Brooklyn Children's Museum Branding + Identity inspired by the patterns, colors, and shapes that were prominent in the Memphis Design Movement. Bold colours and shapes which will appeal to children/parents as well as continuous use of both blue and pink.

A countdown calendar could also be a good idea focusing on one month of the year nationally, focusing on children, schools and parents etc focusing on a different and easy approach/action to climate change each day.

Retro, vintage style prints, featuring recognisable figures - animals, robots etc.

Warm and children friendly colours have been used for the illustrations shown above and below, giving a sense of appeal to children.

Geometric shapes have been used above to form shapes of animals which are recognisable to the reader.

Alphabet illustrations.

A play on words is mixed in to this story book based on Hippos. Hand painted/illustrated covers give a warm, friendly and child like aesthetic/personality.

Flash Cards - Traditional and Simple, whilst already proven effective in schools for years.

'Eat it up' shown in organic colours and a raw, organic type. Illustrative and cartoonish, for a younger audience.

Bright, illustrated and vector image based book cover. Simple language and type has been noticed throughout all of the examples of graphic design for children.

Again another example of a hand-rendered, painted aesthetic which works well for the tone, topic and aesthetic chosen. Makes the poster more whimsical also.

Simple type and image used to educate them on animals - target audience, 3 - 5 years.

Heavy vector graphic from a children's book. Very powerful, strong illustration with good use of colour.

Alphabet - something like shown above, could be used to show different elements of global warming, i.e. sun, rain, floods.. These methods of education are often used at home and in schools from a young age in a range of subjects, especially maths and english.

Very simple text and language use shown above, with children friendly block illustrations.

Colourful, simple vector graphic. Something like this could be used to show the information we want to rely to older children, or even their teachers/parents, with the design style being more advanced.

The tea bags shown have been designed for the children's tea market! they are bright, energetic and aesthetically pleasing. The use of vector images and the addition of 'eyes' are capture children's attention and makes the packaging more aware of it's audience.

Wednesday, 16 April 2014

OUGD501 Design context: Adbusters research

OUGD501
DESIGN CONTEXT
ADBUSTER RESEARCH

The Adbusters Media Foundation is a Canadian-based not-for-profit, anti-consumerist, pro-environment organization founded in 1989 by Kalle Lasn and Bill Schmalz in Vancouver, British Columbia. Adbusters describes itself as "a global network of artists, activists, writers, pranksters, students, educators and entrepreneurs who want to advance the new social activist movement of the information age."

Characterized by some as anti-capitalist or opposed to capitalism, it publishes the reader-supported, advertising-freeAdbusters, an activist magazine with an international circulation of 120,000 devoted to challenging consumerism. Past and present contributors to the magazine include Christopher Hedges, Matt Taibbi, Bill McKibben, Jim Munroe,Douglas Rushkoff, Jonathan Barnbrook, David Graeber, Simon Critchley, Slavoj Zizek, Michael Hardt, David Orrell and others.

Adbusters has launched numerous international campaigns, including Buy Nothing Day, TV Turnoff Week and Occupy Wall Street, and is known for their "subvertisements" that spoof popular advertisements. In English, Adbusters has bi-monthly American, Canadian, Australian, UK and International editions of each issue. Adbusters's sister organizations include Résistance à l'Aggression Publicitaire and Casseurs de Pub in France, Adbusters Norge in Norway,Adbusters Sverige in Sweden and Culture Jammers in Japan.

HISTORY

Adbusters was founded in 1989 by Kalle Lasn and Bill Schmalz, a duo of award-winning documentary filmmakers living in Vancouver. Since the early 1980s, Lasn had been making films that explored the spiritual and cultural lessons the West could learn from the Japanese experience with capitalism.

In 1988, the British Columbia Council of Forest Industries, the "voice" of the logging industry, was facing tremendous public pressure from a growing environmentalist movement. The logging industry fought back with a television ad campaign called "Forests Forever." It was an early example of greenwashing: shots of happy children, workers and animals with a kindly, trustworthy sounding narrator who assured the public that the logging industry was protecting the forest.

Lasn and Shmalz were outraged by the use of the public airwaves to deliver what they felt was deceptive anti-environmentalist propaganda. And they responded by producing the "Talking Rainforest" anti-ad in which an old-growth tree explains to a sapling that "a tree farm is not a forest." But the duo wasn't able to buy airtime on the same stations that had aired the forest-industry ad. According to a former Adbusters employee, "The CBC's reaction to the proposed television commercial created the real flash point for the Media Foundation. It seemed that Lasn and Schmaltz's commercial was too controversial to air on the CBC. An environmental message that challenged the large forestry companies was considered 'advocacy advertising' and was disallowed, even though the 'informational' messages that glorified clearcutting were OK."

The foundation was born out of their belief that citizens do not have the same access to the information flows as corporations. One of the foundation's key campaigns continues to be the Media Carta,[13] a "movement to enshrine The Right to Communicate in the constitutions of all free nations, and in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights."

The foundation notes that concern over the flow of information goes beyond the desire to protect democratic transparency, freedom of speech or the public's access to the airwaves. Although it supports these causes, the foundation instead situates the battle of the mind at the center of its political agenda. Fighting to counter pro-consumerist advertising is done not as a means to an end, but as the end in itself. This shift in emphasis is a crucial element of mental environmentalism.

Anti-advertising

Adbusters describes itself as anti-advertising: it blames advertising for playing a central role in creating, and maintaining, consumer culture. This argument is based on the belief that the advertising industry goes to great effort and expense to associate desire and identity with commodities. Adbusters believes that advertising has unjustly "colonized" public, discursive and psychic spaces, by appearing in movies, sports and even schools, so as to permeate modern culture. Adbusters's stated goals include combating the negative effects of advertising and empowering its readers to regain control of culture, encouraging them to ask "Are we consumers and citizens?"

Since Adbusters concludes that advertising conditions people to look to external sources, to define their own personal identities, the magazine advocates a "natural and authentic self apart from the consumer society". The magazine aims to provoke anti-consumerist feelings. By juxtaposing text and images, the magazine attempts to create a means of raising awareness and getting its message out to people that is both aesthetically pleasing and entertaining.

Activism also takes many other forms such as corporate boycotts and ‘art as protest', often incorporating humor. This includes clever billboard modifications, google bombing, flash mobs and fake parking tickets for SUVs. A popular example of cultural jamming is the distortion of Tiger Woods' smile into the form of the Nike swoosh, calling viewers to question how they view Woods' persona as a product. Adbusters calls it "trickle up" activism, and encourages its readers to do these activities by honoring culture jamming work in the magazine. In the September/October 2001 "Graphic Anarchy" issue, Adbusters were culture jammed themselves in a manner of speaking: they hailed the work of Swiss graphic designer Ernst Bettler as "one of the greatest design interventions on record", unaware that Bettler's story was an elaborate hoax.

Monday, 14 April 2014

Design Context: Joseph Muller Brockmann Aesthetic

OUGD501

DESIGN CONTEXT

JOSEPH MULLER BROCKMANN

AESTHETIC

I have been inspired throughout my design process by Joseph Muller Brockmann's strong use of geometric form and structure as well as his colour choices as seen below.