GRAPHICS: Poetry in Migration

For the first day of our Graphics Rotation, we were asked to bring in a poem that we liked and felt had strong value to it. I chose two poems by artist Robert Montgomery.

The reason I picked these poems is due to it's negative view on current capitalist society. Robert Montgomery describes himself as a Situationist, a philosophy which is almost anarchic in its views as it disagrees with any kind of hierarchy but tends to view individuals as masters of one's own life instead of part of a driven society. Their view on society is that one should not be controlled, condoned or coached into any view and that life is for exploration and fulfillment, meaning success is achievable rather than desirable. Although this strays somewhat from our theme of migration, I feel it does actually branch out into the idea of migration in the terms of identity and how one's identity is produced and developed.

We then attempted to create a poem in groups, where we each thought of our own individual imaginary journeys that we then had to piece together. This is the result of that experiment:

Carrying on from the look at poetry and its impact on the world, we connected the idea of that strong message you can create through poetry and mottos and how it is regularily used in graphic design to create a positive effect on the viewer.

Through this, we were tasked with creating our own poster on the topic of migration.

I wanted to look at the moral that the Israel Loves Iran campaign portrayed with the idea of international relationships and how one country can offer help to another country in need simply for the sake of humanity. I created a group of rough sketched thumbnails I felt conveyed the benefits of Asylum seekers which are shown here:

I then digitalised two of the options I believed would work the best starting with this one:

 

And then this one, which ended up being the final outcome I chose for full size printing:

 

The quote used is a famous quote from freedom fighter Nelson Mandela, a person who I wanted to incorporate into this image due to the fact the purpose of this poster was to show the effects of neglect of third world countries and the lack of media attention and that very much fits what Mandela stood for.

With this project drawing the Graphics Rotation to a close, I am pleased with the outcome of my final project although, drawing from the constructive criticism I received during the exhibition of our pieces, I feel the piece would be improved if I used my own images in the overall graphic due to possible issues with copyright. 

Overall, this rotation has allowed me to experience the Graphics course and has also both refreshed my memory of graphic software from GCSE and has helped me expand into other programs I previously had no experience with such as Adobe InDesign.