First Week Back

First week back, we all were trying to get back into the swings of things.

We had a few good ideas and this week became about patching them all together to create something strong and presentable.

I spent a lot of this week researching into campaigns and different design approaches. We decided if we were going to go with a campaign, we would create posters, leaflets and possibly also a website showcasing different aspects of the campaign.

I researched into different successful political campaigns and the artwork surrounding them. I found interest in the success of Obama’s campaign and the iconic imagery associated with it (tri-tone: red, white and blue).

By the end of the week, our ideas were all over the place.

Although we all had produced great sample imagery; we weren’t moving forwards as a group. We weren’t forming an overall, presentable style which could be applied to the brief of Unit X; so we all decided to meet up and try to establish a possible design style which we could all work with.

I shared my opinion that the idea of a campaign was very overdone, plain and didn’t allow us to be expansive and interesting with our designs. Many of the things we were creating looked very plain and commercial and wouldn’t spark any specific interest or curiosity in viewers. Earlier, I had the idea of merging the ‘missing person campaign’ with a conspiracy-style approach with designs cantered around government leaks and opening the audiences mind to different possibilities. With this came the idea for a ‘case study’ approach.

We then delegated roles to each of the different members of our groups. Me and Anthony would work on a website, Agusia would produce some illustrations and April and Lawrence would work on some posters together. This seemed like a productive strategy as each member was working comfortably with an approach they were confident with.

My first design ideas I produced revolved around simple silhouetted images with various bits of coding surrounding it. My main inspiration for this idea came from the popular game series ‘Assassins Creed’ which is an alternate history game series with lore explaining that many historical events were indeed government cover ups. With these theme, a lot of the game’s design is built up of digital interfaces with different ‘hacking’ and ‘code-cracking’ mini games occasionally presenting you with corrupt images, puzzling images, or images displaying some kind of code. I decided I would play of this idea and try to hide messages in code.

I created this picture of Nefertiti with multiple strings of binary code. Each string of code contained an array of different letters which added up to display a haunting yet captivating message.

After creating the image, I then explored different presentation methods such as adding textures to make it look like a documentation file.

I was then inspired to produce a mock-up documentation file featuring a logo I quickly put together in illustrator.