Sam Miller VCD

Final week:

Put finishing touches on the poster and brochure ready for presentation. Personally, I think the concept and style fit the brief and are successful but I'm not happy with them, mostly the execution.  Booklet

Poster

Decided on the final design for the poster. After changing things around I think it is successful. I did a digital drawing version but it didn't suit the era so I printed it out on watercolour paper and painted in the colour. I think this was successful. The technique added texture which made the poster more interesting. Started adding type.

Removed the girl because it became distracting.

Bought a jar and filled with glitter and water with instruments pasted inside. This was an attempt to make the jar more elegant. These were unsuccessful so I looked into Art Nouveau, the building was built during the period and it is a very elegant and fluid art style. I did a drawing of this and scanned it in to illustrator.

Illustrator version

Interim presentation:  The feedback we received was positive. The pickle Jar concept was most successful with it’s rhetorical approach to the subject. Discussion with partner found it was not elegant enough aesthetically. Will work on that. tried different styles:

We sketched many different concepts looking at visual rhetoric. I came up with many instrument based concepts. The two we’re presenting is a pickle jar filled with instruments (preserving the arts) and a woman dancing who’s dress becomes a clarinet.

Week 2

This week was all final preparations for hand-ins. Slight adjustments made to colours and layouts. 

Final posters:

Rationale:

When given the issue of inequality in New Zealand to work with I decided to focus on gender inequality and the under-representation of women in senior management positions. To bring awareness to this issue with my posters I incorporated logos and ethos along with the wehi aspect of ihi wehi. My posters depict women as currently the ‘black sheep’ when it comes to senior positions. This is logos because it is asking people to become aware of the fact that women are a rarity in these positions. They also use wehi because they speak to the viewer's knowledge of the meaning of the black sheep and feelings that viewers have associated with the term. My works depict my rendition of a grunge/protest art style that still speaks to modernism. This is to show how although we live in a modern society, New Zealand still treats women in an old-fashioned way when it comes to promotions.

Poster Wall:

this week was all about refining and developing concepts. I decided to ditch the elephant concept and use another sheep one. 

i played with colour ways and layout

This class was our second interim presentation.

We displayed two posters at A2 size. I chose, 

This week I spent the week sick at my parents home so spent the week drawing and creating new concepts. 

I hand-drew images of sheep to get a feel for my style. I am also drawn to the ‘animal farm-esque’ style of human/animal meging. 

I then digitised concepts.

This class was about developing our images to incorporate a balance of rhetoric abstract and legibility before adding type. We distilled our purpose for these posters into a sentence and then sketched visual strategies that conveyed this message. 

This week was the first interim presentation. we presented 4 concepts.

my concepts:

This class had us taking our research and our understanding around visual rhetoric to draw up concept thumbnails that can influence our posters. I also did more research on my topic, focusing more on the fact that there are not enough female managers compared to males:  

Strong women Cliches:

When a man gives his opinion, he’s a man. 

When a woman gives her opinion, she’s a bitch.

Glass ceiling

Running in heels

Alpha bitch 

You can have it all! (career, babies, husband)

Dress for success

Making it in a man’s world

Bitch:

Comes from the 1105 word bicche (old-English bicce), also means a female dog (bikkja, Old Norse). Apparently, is derived from the Greek Goddess Artemis who was the goddess of the hunt, she was often portrayed with a pack of hunting dogs and sometimes transformed into an animal herself. She is free, vigorous, cold, impetuous, unsympathetic, beautiful. When used as a derogatory word for women, it refers to sexual behavior.  (Metaphorical extension of the behavior of a dog in heat) Ernest Hemingway was a strong proponent of the term during this time. He was known to expand the meaning of "bitch" to a more modern definition. He used it to represent favorable qualities such as ferocity, edginess, and grit. It was during this time that women began gaining more freedom (such as the right to vote through the Nineteenth Amendment). This newly found freedom woman possessed upset the male-dominated society making anti feminist men of the time feel threatened, possibly leading to retaliation through name-calling. The word "bitch" during the twenties meant "malicious or consciously attempting to harm," "difficult, annoying, or interfering," and "sexually brazen or overly vulgar".

Helen Clark -------------> “Ditch the bitch”

Bitch magazine describes itself as a "feminist response to pop culture".Bitch has also been reappropriated by hip-hop culture, rappers use the adjective "bad bitch" to refer to an independent, confident, attractive woman. The term is used in a complementary way, meaning the woman is desirable. One of the first instances of "bitch" being used in this way is in the song "Da Baddest Bitch" by Trina, released in 1999. This can also be seen throughout multiple different songs from Rihanna's song entitled "Bad Bitch" featuring Beyoncé which reiterates the line "I'm a bad bitch" multiple times.

This week’s class focused on how symbols have preconceived connotations but when placed along side other symbols or positioned differently these meaning are altered and changed. We practiced this idea with a quick 10 sketches exercise. We were given an image to sketch 10 times to portray our issue, mine being gender inequality.

For independent study I continued researching my topic and decided to focus on women in the workplace:

Women are associated with domestic life, while men more public.

“If she acts like a typical manager she is overstepping the boundaries of femininity.

Women are underrepresented in leadership roles and make up ⅔ of those earning minimum wage over 25

Women in senior management positions has declined from 31% to 19%

Women on private sector boards sits at 14.4%

Women find it difficult to move up the corporate ladder while still being expected to maintain their domestic life.

NZ has the lowest pay gap between the genders with a gap of 11%

Women dominated jobs are lower paid