Kate Wells

When will it stop? from Kate Wells on Vimeo.

Music by Keaton Henson (feat. Ren Ford) - Elevator Song

protest

The part of this lecture that caught my attention the most was Peter Kennard’s photomontage work.

This piece of artwork is taken from the famous painting by John Constable; the Hay Wain. It’s a photomontage that has been manipulated to have missiles in it. This was a response to the US nuclear cruise missiles in rural East Anglia and to a Ministry of Defence leaflet that portrayed the missiles in delicate watercolours.  I like it because of it’s subtleness yet powerfulness. He’s using cultural currency to create a powerful message as everyone at the time knew of the painting and understood the current situations he was addressing.

I discovered the meaning of the word subversion and I find it really interesting, its something that I aim to use in lots of my work because I think its a great design aspect. I understood it to mean when you turn something on it’s head in a sneaky way. Indirect messages that pounce upon an unexpecting viewer and make them think. I think often indirect, subversive messages are more effective than shock tactics because shock tactics for me, are something that often I don't want to remember, where as when I see an interesting concept thats subversive and requires thinking it sticks in my mind and can often lead to me discussing it with other people to see if they picked up the same message and find out how they interpreted it. 

I began experimenting with poster design by going back to some images I’d found earlier on in the project that had inspired me. 

This is a mock up I’d made weeks ago to give my group an idea of how I visualised it to look. 

This is a poster I started with our photos on the omelette idea.

I made this in a bit of a rush because I was really feeling the pressure of the deadline now. The problems I had with it was that the omelette didn’t look appealing, I didn’t know where to put the logo, I couldn’t imagine how we were going to fit so much information on to a poster without it being too text heavy. 

We had to get on there 

How to make the omelette

That you have to get the ingredients from the markets with your flat mates

how much the ingredients and over all price is (although it varies)

the fact the you can win a tote bag

and the instructions of uploading a picture to social media with our hash tag. 

This is too much to fit on that poster!

I had a think about ways we could shorten and simplify the information that needed to go onto the poster and came up with a new list of items that needed to be included:

‘Win a bag’

picture of the bag

logo

12 eggs for £1 at the markets

make omelettes with flatmates

upload a pic with #Bhamoutdoormarkets

In a group meeting the next day we were discussing how we could layout this poster in the most effective way. 

This is an advert that we found in the ‘advertising today’ book by Warren berger. 

We liked it because of the simplicity of the layout. We thought maybe we could use the photo space as a picture of our tote bag and just have some simple text and our logo in the bottom space.

Whilst we discussing this I was thinking that our campaign is quite confusing and long winded and how we could simplify it. i thought about maybe not narrowing it dow to omelettes, but then if people uploaded pics of their food we wouldn't know it was from the markets. 

I then had the idea of using our stickers (which Jen had been working on designing) as a sort of treasure hunt. So we’d stick stickers around the markets and people would go and find the stickers and upload pictures of them with the hashtag. That way we’d know that they'd actually been to the markets. Also I thought if we make the stickers say some of the prices and people were uploading them online then they would be spreading the word of the cheap prices. 

These are the stickers we came up with:

This is our original sticker design:

This is another version of it because Rob suggested that the shape of the sticker could make it stand out from the others.

These are the three stickers that we’d hope people would find around the markets and upload. The prices on them are genuine prices that we’ve found at the markets.

We then discussed how he could create a simple poster that explained this and showed the tote bag.

Jacob and Jen went to take photos of the tote bag with students in use around uni so that we had a photo of it to put on the poster. 

Meanwhile I came up with a basic poster layout:

We quickly realised that the font I had chosen completely contrasted with Jacobs posters and that we should agree on a font and stick to it through out the project. We chose this one because its simple, bold and effective. I also prefer this one a lot to my original one. 

We added in the photo and i changed the colour of the word ‘win’ so it contrasted with the image more. I also added some arrows that I drew in illustrator onto the poster to make it more visual and extra clear. We weren’t 100% sure that the picture looked right because it’s quite busy and we didn’t know if there was enough attention on the tote bag. 

On this poster we added a gradient because we felt that it brought it all together a bit more.

on this one we tried a different photo and thought it looked better (I'm not sure i agree) but the majority of the group wanted this image. We also tired changing the colour of the ‘Win’ so that it stood out as much as possible. 

We played around with the back ground blur to make it stand out more and I think this made it look much more effective.  

Omelette Gif

When we were cooking our omelette and photographing all the stages and the ingredients for the poster, we decided we were going to make a gif that also explained how to make an omelette and what you need.

I spent about 3 days solidly working on this as I had to individually cut out all the ingredients and stages and then make a gif out of them which I’d only learnt to do a few days ago. I quickly realised making gifs is harder than I’d initially thought. This is a contact sheet of all the photos from the shoot that I was working with.

This is a photo of all the images I individually cut out (this took me hours)

I had an unbelievable amount of problems such as ‘why does this egg appear on every slide when I copy it?’ and ‘how do I copy and paste slides?’ I also had technical problems with the images going blurry because I had to reduce the size of them so much due to the fact they were taken in raw and gifs are considerably smaller in size. I also wanted to change the brightness on a lot of the images but apparently things that are usually fairly straight forward on photoshop become a lot more complexed when animation is involved (understandably). I was also under a lot of pressure because the deadline was looming and I was aware that the poster still hadn't come together at all and I couldn’t even picture how it was going to look at this stage. Being the graphic designer in the group I figured it was proabably my responsibility to take care of the poster but I couldn’t visualise it and felt under pressure. 

I hadn't yet included the price of the ingredients or said how the campaign works (the idea of going to the market buying the ingredients, making the omelette and uploading the picture to social media with out hashtag in order to potentially win a tote bag) and I felt the gif needed some music and sound effects because it was fairly long. (111 slides!) 

design inspiration

The ikea cookbook displayed food recipes and images of food really creatively and simply. the pictures look quirky and fun, easy to read and intriguing. I think this is a really out of the box way of showing a list of ingredients. The cookbook was designed by ikea and a photographer called Carl Kleiner. This is another one of Kleiner’s works which I found really interesting as it’s a similar idea to my tomato typography. 

It has a similar sort of 3D look about it and is an unusual way to see typography. 

Another way of displaying how to make food was some adverts than Jen found called the ‘Dairy farmers of Quebec:

A slightly different way of showing food and ingredients is this ‘every things better with milk’ campaign. They've actually shaped the food into a milk carton shape and instead showing different ingredients they are showing a range of foods but it’s still a nice, different way of shooing foods. i also like the simplicity of the advert and the lack of text.

This is a design that Jen drew as a mock up for a potential poster that shows how to make an omelette. Unfortunately we’re running out of time and I think this kind of poster would be challenging to make particularly in such a small amount of time. 

Photographer

Richard Maxted is a photographer who specialises in still life advertising. 

In relation to the last lecture, Richard Maxted also seems to use layout as a main design aspect in his work. Rob pointed me in the direction of him because of how he makes something reasonably dull or average look spectacular through the use of lighting and layout/composition.  We were struggling with making our omelette look appealing so this inspired me to try laying out my posters in a different way throughout the use of patterns or repetitiveness.

I created this by repeating the same tomato over and over and placing just one leaf on it. i quite like the aesthetic of it and i think its definitely eye catching however I wasn't sure how or where to incorporate text into it. This gave me the idea of making text out of tomatoes. I like my design work to be quite hands on and practical so this idea appealed to me greatly. 

This was my plan of how I was going to go about cutting the tomatoes up.

This was the result of the cutting of tomatoes (it was herder than I’d anticipated)

I got them into photoshop and cut out the letters individually.

I then arranged them in the poster and used the liquify tool to neaten them up.

This was some experimentation as a second attempt at a new way of arranging the letters. 

I really like the look of the typography and I think the tomato texture comes across really well however I didn’t really find a way that I was happy with when it came to the page layout. I tried minimising it to just the type to see how that would look.

Production 

In the 19th century page layout hadn't really been created as a concept yet. Below is an example of a newspaper layout from the 19th century.

Aspects of this design are similar to the layout we use today for newspapers. The similarities are obviously the columns, the simple san-serif type and the use of monotones. The differences are that the type is too small to read comfortably - you’d need a magnifying glass, the lack of visual hierarchy, and the fact its so text heavy. During the late 19th century advertising became necessary because of the need to communicate to the masses. This was during a time where fordism was emerging. Fordism was a manufacturing method of mass production which went by the theory of time = money, so the idea was creating machines or using workers like machinery to create products in as little time as possible. Fordism coincided with consumerism which was also emerging at the time. Consumerism encouraged advertising to become necessary as the numbers in sales of manufactured products went up. The dadaist movement came about shortly after this time as their aim was to protest, to get a political message out to the masses, after the 1st world war. 

I find dadaism very inspiring because it’s art thats portraying a strong message indirectly through design layout. They purposly ignore all the usual conventions of art to create something chaotic and ilogical to spread a message about the state of society at the time. 

Other examples of artists who use layout as a form of communication could be Andreas Gursky.

This is a digitally manipulated photograph of a supermarket. The way he’s edited it exaggerates the consumerism because of the business and use of repetitiveness. 

Andy Warhol also uses repetitive layout to communicate consumerism:

The image itself (in this case soup) is completely meaningless but the layout of it and the repetitiveness is the part that says a message. Andy Warhol’s audience would be so absorbed in the same image from seeing it so many times that the image itself lost all meaning. Also the way in which Andy Warol worked was the same idea as fordism. He would have people working in his factory that produced lots of the same images in a way that he'd instructed them to, similarly to how a machine functions. 

We screen printed our tote bags and the result was great!

These are some posters that Jacob came up with. I really like them because their clear and to the point, I also like the font. However, I think the style of the editing of photography is too dark and gives out a message that isn't as welcoming because it doesn't look like a very bright, positive place. Also we discussed the message that he wrote on there because our method of approach isn't so much ‘save your markets’ but informing how cheap they are and how beneficial they are for students. We decided to take a more positive approach. 

This is a version that Jen made based on the same style.

referring back to our brief again, we realised we still had the issue of integrating ‘immigration’ into our project. We found out from the stall holders that the market stock comes from all over the world. I spotted a link here in that this fresh, amazing-value fruit is underrated because people don't know enough about it, much like immigrants themselves and how they're portrayed in the media - often underrated. 

to show this visually Jen suggested we try double exposing fruit and countries so I made these: 

I think they look quite aesthetically pleasing however as our target audience is students I think it’s really important that we have a really strong clear message and I'm not sure this does that. Maybe some anchorage like text could make it more clear. 

After showing this to my group, Jen suggested I put the green background colour that she has designed our stickers to have on this so that they link.

At first it made the font colours which I had chosen from the mango itself with the eyedropper tool all clash against each other and look sickly. Below is the logo after I changed it to the inverses colour of the background, but it looked even worse.

I then changed it to black but I think it looks to dark compared to the rest of the image and so I tried it in white which looks a bit better especially because i made it a gradient so it blends to white.

I tried doing some more experimentation with eggs instead of tomatoes but the colours don't look quite as good because the colours of eggs aren't as bright as the redness of tomatoes. 

I prefer the bottom one but I think it needs further development because it doesn't look like an advert and the logo looks odd perhaps because its too bold and sharp for the rest of the poster. I quite like the aesthetic of the stamp font photoshopped onto the egg however I don't know if its clear enough. I wanted something really simple and obvious that can't be missed purely to get the point across because its such a simple message; The market is unbelievably cheap! 

Having been to the market and bought some goods, we took photos of all of it so we could do some experimentation. 

one of the bargains we got was 26 tomatoes for £1!

I wanted to try and show this as boldly and simply as possible.

here is the original photo followed by some experiments:

We had to think quite a lot about which recipe to use because it was important that it was appealing for students and that all of the ingredients actually came from the market - otherwise it completely defeats the point. 

I looked in some student cook books for inspiration:

From these books I realised the factors that they use to target students is using pictures to show visually and quickly the final outcome, also making meals seem simple and quick to make. For example on the book the right they give three different time options. The back of the book on the left says ‘want to see what your food should look like?’ and have made it a usp that there’s a photo for each recipe so they must think its a very strong factor for students.

some idea’s that we came up with were:

Casseroles

ratatouille

veg lasagne 

smoothies - not many students have blenders

veg kebabs

Moroccan style veg

fruit alcoholic beverages

chorizo pasta bake

veggie burgers

pizza - not sure about dough and a few other ingredients

tapas

guacamole - don't know what it is

We couldn't really make a decision until we went down to the markets and saw what was there so today we went down and realised there was a lot more of a range of food than we realised. This meant our project was made a lot easier. I also couldn’t believe the prices of the food down there! Despite having been there before. After wondering around a lot we decided to make omelettes because we found out that eggs are 12 for £1! and people can choose their own fillings.