Ruth Johnson VCD 2017 Sem 2

On Monday I got a lot of really helpful feedback from my teachers, (all annotated in my physical workbook) and so for the most of this time up until hand in I was just making small adjustments to my text and positioning and really making use of the FDPs we've learned in classes.  Rationale: Aim/Concept: To raise awareness to gender inequality that’s still prevalent in New Zealand workplaces. After researching, I decided to focus on the issue of the ‘glass ceiling .’ This is the idea that women are held back from promotions and positions of power simply due to their gender (they are kept below this ‘ceiling’ of glass where the ‘top’ is visible, but unreachable.) While conceptualising I found that ‘ smash the patriarchy ’ while combined with this idea of the glass ceiling created a lot of visual potential. Strategy 1: I decided to use the king and queen chess pieces to symbolise gender roles as the ‘rules’ of life and New Zealand workplaces. I.e whil...

This interim presentation was really helpful for me, i got a lot of useful feedback which is annotated in my physical workbook and this really solidified the direction i needed to take to finalise my posters. It was at this point that i realised i needed to really hone down on my conceptual focus of workplace gender inequality when it comes to the glass ceiling, not just the pay gap. I took this in mind when continuing iterations of my chess design, and i found this helped me really envisage the message i wanted to send to viewers. Most of the other changes i made from the feedback were small practical changes around legibility and layout, but i found after i made these changes my posters started to appear more cohesive and thoughtful, less thrown together.

Revising/ making iterations of digital posters. Exploring different rendering options/styles- particularly with the chess concept.  This week I got a couple of context photos of the emergency exit signs from the wellington busses that I'd been visualising while designing my 'breaking glass' concept. Hopefully this will help in keeping my posters accurate in their representation of this. I also spent the first half of this week exploring different textual mediums both physical and digital for my concepts. The most successful of these i found are shown below, most taken from the rough painted chess pieces and then edited digitally with textured effects from there. There are more printed iterations of this design in my physical workbook, including exploration into attempting to make the chess pieces look as if they're made of shattering glass?

This week was the first interim presentation. Below are the 4 poster concepts i presented and a summary of the feedback i received from my teachers and peers. (Full feedback sheet in physical workbook.) Most people commented that although this concept was good, they felt the blue text 'patriarchy' was unnecessary and took away from the main idea and would be better represented in some other way. One other person noted that this looks like the Japanese flag.... and now i can stop seeing this so i'd quite like to change the background to perhaps a blurry photograph of a window? This was my most popular concept by far, though one person noted that having the checkered background made it appear quite busy overall, in developing this concept further I think a plain/ flat colour background may be more successful. (Try a more minimalistic approach) There was only one comment about this concept and that was that it was unclear specifically about wether it was tha...