Jay's Visual Journal

What is it that I value in my life that is a materialistic thing?

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Painting: Charles II Presented with a Pineapple - British School (1677)

Pineapples were considered an exotic fruit, presented to and eaten by only the richest or the most royal. Nowadays, you could buy a pineapple in supermarkets either processed in a can in chunks as well as the entire fruit itself for £1, more or less. The cost of the pineapple devalued when the fruit became more and more readily available for the everyday public to consume.

How is value created?

‘Nothing can have value without being an object of utility.’ ‘Labour is the substance, and the immanent measure of value’

Karl Marx (1867)

Das Kapital, Vol. 1

In essence, human labour = value

Max Borders says:

'Subjective value can be a tough idea for some people to grasp. It can be even harder for people to accept. But here’s the hard truth: Value does not inhere in things … All economics begins and ends with something rather illusive: the private states of people’s minds.’

2012, FEE.com

It is arguable that children have a better sense of value than adults as their innocence and naivety lets them appreciate the smallest things in life more than we ever can as we get older, such as the reflection of oneself in a small puddle.

The virtuous circle of economic growth:

In the early 1700s, wages began to rise - meaning families had more to spend on small luxuries. The more money families spent, the more businesses grew, the more workshops opened to manufacture the goods, the more people were employed, the more wages went up, and so on. This time has been described as ‘the first consumer revolution’.

Benefits of Capitalism:

It drives national prosperity and can make a difference to the lives of the weak and the poor - apprentices can be trained, hospitals can be built etc.

Incentives to get rich can lead to innovation.

Freedom - not only in choice of consumer goods, but also in careers.

[supposed] Equality - everyone has the chance to ‘make it big’. 

Consequences of Capitalism:

Consumers can be exploited (or seemingly controlled) by large firms which tend to monopolise.

Industrial impacts can be detrimental to the environment.

It can lead to high levels of inequality between the rich and the poor.

Workers can feel alienated.

According to Lara Furniss, the future of design industry and education lies in the ability to think and work beyond discipline. These lectures will:

Provide me with a slightly more in-depth contextual framework that will underpin my overall practice

Give me a chance to learn about various ways of seeing the world/areas of critical theory

Provide me with further research to carry on and undertake in my own time

For this particular module we were tasked to design a festival of our choice in order to create a “full brand experience” for the fantasy of our choice, our festival could be related to music, film, food or any other hobby/interest we could think of. We had to back all of our creations up with necessary competitor research, audience profiling for our individual chosen demographics, festival name generation as well as multiple iterations of brand logo designs, branding guidelines and other elements of communication pieces that we could choose to create, to enhance the experience of bringing our visions to life. I chose to target a slightly wider audience age range from 16 to 40 to be able to incorporate a musical lineup that can attract both younger and older audiences. I chose my music festival to celebrate the genres of Hip-Hop, Rap, R&B, Soul, Neo-Soul, Latin, Reggae and Grime. These choices of musical genres covers a wide span of audiences of different ages, races and tastes and would be considered a great mixture of cultures to come on one stage together. My best idea came from the anticipation of my peers on the expectation of what my festival might ultimately become. It was because people kept telling me whatever I ended up creating, I would be creating a “vibe”, that word lingered to me in a special way and became the entire essence of the festival itself and thus, became the festival name. As this ‘vibe’ was being implied that it would be a fun environment and mood to be a part of, I decided to hand write the word ‘Vibe’ out to give the custom logo typeface that quirky quality to reflect the mood of the festival.

This being said, I sketched out 25 designed iterations of the word ‘vibe’ in all sorts of ways, even experimented with different pens and pencils to be able to trial different textures, tones and calligraphic patterns depending on the different pressures and outcomes of the tools I was using to create my iterations. I was slightly inspired by the works of Peter Saville and what he did to recreate the Lacoste logo for special edition polo shirts. When it came to finding a typeface that completely fitted the look of my finalized logo, I looked to the Bread Collective on how they paired different fonts with backgrounds and colours, creating a both clean and creative look effortlessly and this was something I wanted to try emulate in my work. I mainly used Adobe Illustrator to create my communication pieces but also used Adobe Photoshop and After Effects to create other pieces of work that was quicker and more appropriate to create in a much fluid way. Using Illustrator to vectorise my logo was very easy as well as practical so that once it becomes a vector shape, I can scale that up however large I would want to for prints of large scale banners or bespoke laser cut acrylic signage for the stage and there would be no loss of quality as vectors as mathematically calculated compared to images that are made up of pixelated squares. I used Photoshop to create the screenshots of the VIBE smartphone app because it was easier for me to create content for those made up screenshots on there. I used After Effects to create a project that I would later render out as my event teaser ad, which I unfortunately was not able to fully complete but was able to upload the first 25-seconds or so of my video content to Vimeo, linked to my Tumblr post regarding this topic, to demonstrate an example of the kind of concept I was trying to execute in my video.

Secret 7″ Competition Submission

Event Teaser Ad Development

Image 1 - Screenshot of Instagram Story video uploaded 21/04/2018 of me mixing two songs together which ended up a part of my final audio mix as the backing track of the event teaser ad

https://soundcloud.com/jaydahya/vibe-teaser-ad-final-cut

Image 2, 3 & 4 - Screenshots of illustrations of lineup artists as part of how I reveal my lineup in my event teaser ad

Image 5 - Screenshot of Adobe After Effects project, showing show I have laid out my working layers as well as how I have used key frames to fade out the music at the end of the video.

Due to the limited amount of time that I had to complete this teaser ad, I decided to cut the video short and present 10 illustrated images of my lineup as part of the concept behind how I was trying to create my video.