First project to design an A3 poster which advertises an object or a social issue. When picking an object think about what the object could represent.
For this project I choose to do the social issue as I thought it would be quite hard to pick an object, one which I could really get into. I think I would get bored of thinking of ways to advertise an object. There are things such as keys etc which open doors etc, but I think I would find it hard to graphically represent. So I decided to choose a social issue- one that hasn't been /or people don't really know about. I first looked through some websites for a social issue that I could base my poster on.I came up with a few ideas like building in third world countries, but its not what I thought it was so I changed my idea. Not knowing a lot of social issues I found it quite hard to do. But I finally found my issue which was the shorter working week.
I found out a lot of things around this such as: the fact that Britain's work the most hours than any other country in Europe. Working between 35-37 hours a week.I found things like our pay rates and how much time off we have and holiday time.
My point to get across was that it would be a good idea to have a shorter working week as you would be able to spend more time with the family, and more free time, more time to organise your time with the house etc.
I carried on with my research, I found some interesting things though, like the fact that a shorter working week would cause more stress. I think that when I was thinking about it I only looked at the positive effects it could have on people, but realised some of the negatives of a shorter working week, I read on website that a shorter working week could have some serious health effects. I think some people would prefer it, but others wouldn't like when I asked the class they like a shorter working week. But I think thats because thats them as a student.
My next step was to research into styles of advertising, illustration styles, and advertising companies.
I the came up with some designs in my sketchbook, just some quick scribbles which lead to other ideas etc, coming up with some tag lines which I found quite hard to do. But used ones that had been used on other pieces, and then coming up with ones of my own based around ones I had looked at.
Then I started my final design, I didn't leave enough time really to do this I found it which I think was a big mistake, I literally had one day to come up with the final piece. I came up with a design in my initial ideas, one which I had developed from my intial ones.I thought of an object to represent, or one that I could work on to do with a shorter working week. Whilst doing my research I saw this one advertisement/ poster which I didn't really get, as it was literally just a white coat-hanger on a black background. Maybe it was just an image, but I quite liked the style of it, just its simplicity. So I decided a calendar anyway would be the best object to use, I didn't make it exactly as simple as what I had seen,not just a calendar in a block of colour (as it would have been hard to see what my advertisement was about).
The next day I had a critique where I some points were brought up about the simplicity of it, such as: saying that the illustration style of it was good, and people pointed out things like the fact that October doesn't have 28 ays in it. Some things which were very small, like maybe changing the type or changing where the tag line was. Another idea was to take a photograph of an old calendar and then working on top of it, but the whole the point of my design was to make it simple, but I thought it was a good idea as another experiment, something which I could try out anyway.I felt afterwards like I got a good general feedback from this, with good suggestions on how to improve the final outcome.
The day after we had another critique by one of our tutors knowing nothing about what the advertisement was for.
When it cam to mine she said that she thought it was about day light savings- she wondered why october as you change the clocks that month so that was one thing to change, and maybe the illustration style- but I was so set on this working, she also said about looking at the negatives of a shorter working week because many companies would not be happy as it means less money for them, etc.
When I handed in my final I made the weekend into red to potentially show a negative, and then changed the month to february, but she said why february - I felt like I could have put any month and she would have said the same- so I felt either way like i couldn't please, it was a real hard one maybe the style of illustration was wrong.I got such positive feedback from one and then not very good to another (or I felt like this), and handing in.
