FMP Week 4

Due to the mismanagement of time spent on the MARS collaboration project, this week was a massive catch-up week to get back on schedule. It combined tasks from both week 3 which I had not completed and tasks from week 4 which relied on the completion of week 3's outcomes.

Initially, I wanted to take the topic I had focussed on and find an already established label for the medium my focus fits in to well, and therefore looked into the 90s trend known as "culture jamming". Culture Jamming was a tactic used by anti-consumerist socialist activists which consisted of disrupting or subverting media culture by hijacking or parodying mass media in its own medium. The thing that led me to look into culture jamming was the anti-corporate/consumerist magazine Adbusters where avant-garde artists would transform corporate advertisements with subversive messages.

The look into the history of culture jamming and looking at how it has changed over the years into a more multimedia platform as technology has evolved has helped me look at how I can plan my campaign of advertisements and the creation of my master brand by looking at how past examples of culture jamming have reached an audience.

Through this research I also looked at particular artists involved in the culture jamming movement as well as the Adbusters group and found the work of Ron English. Gaining a visual insight into the aesthetics of someone whose work mainly focuses on satirising corporations I compared this to the work on Alan Fletcher, an artist in the 50s known as the Godfather of British graphic design, who revolutionised the aesthetic of corporate advertising. The difference between Ron English's and Alan Fletcher's work helped me to work out how I can produce my own unique form of "subvertisements". Alan Fletcher used a clean, professional yet vibrant and eye-catching aesthetic for the use of corporations to attract an audience whereas Ron English preferred the use of shock illustrations which forced the message very forcefully. Despite this, Ron English's subversion of various cereal box designs gave me the idea to take the official advertisements of unethical corporations and alter them to project my own message rather than adding to them.

                         Alan Fletcher

                       Ron English

I then started to work on some initial sketches to try and get ahead of week 4 and to have some visual mock-ups as a final outcome to this week. I focussed on the subversion of the existing logos of various brands that I know use unethical procedures whether in production, distribution or advertising. This was then able to allow me to go into the Mid-Point Review with some substance to really start experimenting bringing a unique style to my aim.

Through my midpoint review, I got some good feedback to work on, including the idea to outline a message for my overall campaign and an aim to each particular piece, from which I got the idea to look into my master brand idea more as an addition to each piece I design and having the aim of each piece to be specific to the brand I am targetting.

I therefore focussed the last few days of week 4 on expanding exploration of scandals associated to specific brands and to take this into experimentation of idea of subversion. It also helped me to narrow down the target for my final outcome to designing 3 pieces: a billboard; a web design; a leaflet to use as "subvertisements" and then a leaflet outlining my master brands campaign, designed to its particular brand specification.

'MARS' Collaboration Project

During the first week back after Easter Break, we were given the chance to take part in a collaboration project with students from the Lens Based Media course. The brief for this project was quite ambiguos and led us to question the possible outcomes for this project. We had to decide on a group of four, keeping it balanced between Graphics students and LBM students but due to issues with numbers, my group was left with only one LBM student and three Graphics students.

My group consisted of Nagi, an illustrator from Graphics; Amy, a designer from Graphics; Lauren, a photographer from LBM and myself. Due to all knowing each other already, we were able to assign particular jobs to each of us due to our skillsets and set out pretty quickly on developing an idea. We had decided to merge all our ideas for FMP due to their similar connection to mental health and psychology and how these are effected by external factors.

Due to this also being a week mainly used for our FMP, we did not manage our time for this project very well and lost 2 days on just organising research we could put forward to our group and were left to the last day to create a visual outcome and presentation. 

Although it was a new experience collaboration with students from another course, which I believe is a good idea in terms of work due to the opportunity to expand into other mediums I may not be comfortable with but due to the issues with numbers meaning we had only one LBM students, there was not much difference to how we worked and it ended with a mainly Graphic-type outcome. There was also an issue with work ethic from half the group and it ended up meaning we had a very rushed outcome that I was not particularily happy with.

FMP Week 3

Further narrowing down my topic focus was the main objective for this weeks work schedule, and to do so I used my current range of secondary research into branding (i.e. Alan Fletcher), and expanded into looking into the effects of advertising, as this was the main area of exploration in this project. To do so, I separated my research into political theories and art movements to look into corporate advertising and the opposition it faces in social media.

I looked into the use of exploitation of the human mind that many brands use purely for profit from the viewpoint of the theories (such as anarchism, Marxism and Situationism) I had already studied so that I could connect theory to method. Contextualising like this helped to see the effects of ideologies and philosophies in play in society today and how people react to this.

I discovered a website called "Adbusters" which follow and anarchic and situationist approach to satirising modern media and corporate branding through its use of exploitation and manipulation. Through this, I was able to further delve into the Situationist art movement and came across some useful artists to look in to for their radical belief and theories and also their method of satirising corporation by displaying their unethical methods in a very "in-your-face" way.

I then carried out some primary research in the form of a survey which aimed to use the information I had gathered from looking into psychological studies in advertising to gather some raw data to be used to compare and contrast with the artist research I had from more radical art movements and to then connect to designers who work within corporation for profit.

Designing this survey, I attempted to keep the questions quite open so as to gather some real first hand experiences to work from. I also then decided to use the survey as an advertisement in itself, by sharing it on my Facebook profile in the hopes that this could also affect the answers to the survey by showing who (in terms of age, gender, occupation, etc.) actually clicked on the survey in the first place.

Using the results to this survey, I connected the effects described by the people who had filled out this survey to the studies I had looked at that described the effect of advertising and how corporations exploit mentality, often in unethical ways, to gain popularity and profit.

This week went well in terms of keeping to schedule and I was even able to do additional research which was scheduled to be done next week which can now be freed up to add to the design development process.