D&AD

• D&AD brief to make a direct mail shot for Crisis a well- known organisation that helps the homeless, the target audience is for 30-50 year olds. We have to make awareness and the mail shot has to be creative. intelligent and gritty, we have to consider materials we use for this project.
  

For this project I am working with Martin. Our first idea was to create almost a box/flat box, where by if you pop in a pound the image would change.

Obviously the first thing we did was to research into Crisis the actual organisation, and then research into simple stats about the homeless. We also looked into life stories from being homeless and then organisations helping people to rebuild their lives. After looking at this we had the ideas of making the image change into a homeless person to a person who looks clean shaven, well dressed etc.

The problem with this idea is that we had to think about how we would turn this idea into a reality- how we would fit the money into the box, we thought of using a mechanism where by you put money into a slot and then push this in. But another query we thought about was the safety of sending money in the post. As there have been a lot of questions about sending money in the post about people stealing.

We mainly thought about the images for the next few weeks, about how it should work- the mechanism. Having an image with a homeless man turning into a buisness man (or someone who turns into someone who looks clean, shaven etc). Then we thought about having the mechanism so it was like a billboard so images were sliced and alternate so when they move it showed the transition, another thing that we thought about though for making this was the cost of the thing itself, as we are aware Crisis don't have a lot of money to spend on  this so we needed to consider this as a major thing.

the next thing we thought about was placing homeless person into different scenes, different scenarios, such as a club- outside the club, or inside, but after we looked at different places we thought that this would appeal to a more younger audience, compared to the one we are aiming at. Another place we thought of was a inside/ outside a car, and some other typical places where homeless people would be, we went round town as some added research. We thought of a bank- sort of brings the opposite into the reality.

We then thought this was quite typical and thought that others would think of this, we spoke to Neil and he agreed. 

We had a crit with both Neil and Catell an illustrator who came in and helped us with D&AD. I found her really useful, very good in the way she talks and overall I found her most useful. She said in both her talk and to us to look at recent work, what's now which I found to be one of the most useful pieces of information given to us. Neil also said to look at advertising where by its supposed to be funny and creative- something thats different. We looked at a few of these to be honest on bored. 

These we found really coo, they were so clever.

We then had out talk with Hannah who also came into help us with this competition brief. e literally came up with our idea in this session- or it was the session that made us think the most about an idea. We said about our idea, and then she said about some projects that she had done- bout the one where she sent random items in the post and they al came back, she said as long as you have a stamp on the item it should come through, this made both me and Martin think about sending an object;

• It's something different- and something that hopefully no-one would have thought of.
  

So the next thing to think about was the object would be.

The next day Martin came up with some possibilities, the main one being the key, and then we thought of others I thought of a pen. As previously we was looking at tag lines, we both wrote a list, of possibilities, and then Catell looked at them, she said she would keep away from the obvious words such as door, open, words that were quite typical. So we said about looking at some of the videos we looked at, and one of the comments we saw also, that said something like wonder ever how homeless people have pens, or where do homeless people get pens from, hence why I thought of making a pen. We researched into this small pens and materials you can buy them in, but then we just thought that the key was such a strong idea.

We then looked at materials in which we could make the key and the cost, we went down to a local key cutters and they had some aluminium ones which were really light, we did want them in bright colours, to really stand out, but discussed with Hannnah that really red would be a good colour, pure red like the Crisis logo. But the only colours they did was metallic blue, Then we thought of a clear plastic so we went to model making and managed to get it done there by creating an illustrator file, we designed it so that the logo would be cut out ad then have some etching marks like a key.

When we got it back we was so chuffed with the final key he did five for us, ones where the logo was cut out, and one where it had been etched, we made a decision that the etched one looked the best, and more clear. As we was told when we asked if they could do us some samples.

After we looked at the tag itself, this was a simple matter, we looked at type first, we wanted a san-serif type - nothing to fussy, though we had discussed previously about hand-writing it in a script type of font. but we looked at this and decided to have it in the pure red as we couldn't get the key done in the colour we wanted. So we looked at type and then how to place it as our tag line is;

UNCOMFORTABLE?

We wondered whether to have it in capitals or not. We then placed the type in the middle, to one side and then just slightly off so it was still legible, but could potentially make people feel 'uncomfortable' reading it, as people like it when everything is properly placed, and we slightly slanted it to get more of a feeling of what the tag line says.

Discussion over the key ring itself.

Martin spoke to Neil about our idea. He said he wanted to see some visuals- a poster something to put it into context we thought about putting it on a front door mat, he said there was lots of possibilities of where you could put it,

But back to the tag he said that instead of paper/ card you could get some cheap plastic ones, where you take out the middle, this is just another possibility and i thought it was a good idea, but I got the feeling that Martin liked using paper/ card, but we are going to try both of these and see which one we feel looks better. Then its a case of printing these off and then doing the poster.