FMP.

Project Proposal: Forgotten England

Progress and Achievement:
Since the start of the course I have picked up a greater understanding of the importance of design and communication in our society. Graphic Design is essential for conveying concepts and emotions between one another and although we cannot always change others' points of view it is important to inform them of our own.

Context:
Over the course of the year, I have grown a desire to express the voices of those that cannot always speak for themselves, or who are more often than not overlooked and unheard. During the "interrupt" project I found it very interesting to explore political and social issues through the medium of visual communication. Artists such as the "Guerrilla Girls" and the "Art of Asbestos" take existing and often iconic imagery and play around with the debates that they can provoke by subverting the imagery.

Project Proposal Aims, Methods and Realisation:
For this project, I propose to investigate the lives of the forgotten people of our society, be they the unemployed, undervalued or unloved. In the working world we have problems with poor working conditions, unfair pay and inequality. Often people who experience these problems are doing essential jobs which our society relies upon in order for basic function. In my opinion the labourers, factory workers, bin men and civil servants are the unsung heroes of England. Outside of the working world England experiences high rates of unemployment and homelessness and everybody knows these are pressing issues yet they are never solved. Through in depth research and investigation I intend to bring light to these issues and to the stories and lives of those who really experience Forgotten England. I will use whichever processes are necessary for conveying the concepts i come across, but will stick mainly to visual and print media as well as film if possible. It is essential for the success of my work that i go out into the city and talk to people, get a real feel for the hardship that people of our country go through, and document my findings in detail.

Evaluation:
I will evaluate my progress and consider my approach to the project through the use of a blog, which is a useful tool for multi-media display of my ideas. I aim to link the blog up with other internet users so that my progress can be evaluated and criticised by them. I will also keep a logbook with me to note down thoughts as and when they happen. Furthermore, interim critiques at college will prove vital for the development of my work through discussion with tutors and other students.

don't you just hate it when strangers tell you to smile?

well in response to a brief called how things work, i was that stranger. i published a blog and a series of posters instructing the [non-existant] audience how smiling works and how to do it more often. i actually wanted to make a film based on the imagery i had been working with, which i really liked but i was short for time and ended up with a blog because it seemed the quickest and easiest thing to do. then again that's what the majority of my work is. ah well here's some pictures.

aaaaah

finished. what to write waste with? waste. duh!
et voila;

more hypocritical anti-consumerism.

turns out there wasnt a crit as such for the cataloging project i did, and ive got a bit more time to work on it. i soon realised that the one word [consume] didnt really seem finished so i'm making a sentence out of it.

consume
more
waste
more

i just have to find something to write waste with.

links links links links.

heres a website i stumbled across recently. to be honest im surprised i hadnt already heard about it, its that good. fontstruct.com is a font creation website with built-in software with many customisable modular parts which you use to create fully working fonts. it also works like flickr in the networking sense, you can share and download yours and others fonts and stuff like that. so basically its pretty cool, check it you get me.




and here are two links for a couple more mixes ive made, i dont think theyre as good as my previous one, but theres some pretty good tracks and some new remixes on them so your ears might enjoy them.

a more chilled out dubstep mix

a bit of everything

and if you go to sumopaint.com theres a pretty cool online illustrator software which makes a nice free alternative to photoshop

thats all from me

miserable old bags.

5 o clock this afternoon.
deadline tomorrow morning.
my photoshop mindmap thing with books and cds et cetera still looks shite and i havent thought of anything better to do.
but in comes my brother with his arms full of shopping bags from covent garden and i have an idea. you wouldnt believe the amount of shopping bags that are lying around my house. hundreds. literally. so here's what i did with them, i'm pretty happy with it for a 2am last minute jobby.

I have a new phone. Its pretty spangly.

This is me testing out on the go blogging. Just in case there ever comes a time when I think of something so awe inspiring and important that I simply must publish it on the world wide web there and then.

I can live in hope.
Sent from my BlackBerry® wireless device

stumped.

this time round i've got two weeks to answer a brief [well, 1 week and 3 days left now] but it seems the more time ive got to get work done, the harder it is. the idea is to catalogue everything. well not exactly everything, but everything within certain confines that i can set. once ive collected all of these things they have to be catalogued or organised in some way which i imagine should be relevant to the confines.

i have no idea what to do.

i listed all of the books dvds cds games and videos that i have on a few shelves in my room, and im photoshopping a sort of mindmap of them and finding ways to link them all together, but it doesnt look very good and i dont really know where it's going.

i guess what i want to do is something related to consumerism and waste, maybe about the throwaway nature of clothes nowadays, somehow linked to the poor conditions in which sweatshop workers make them.

meh.

tragedy in the fog.

this is the first part of a zine that im putting together to inform train passengers and commuters of the legacy of the forgotten lewisham rail crash of 1957. ive got a couple of really beautiful old newsreel report films which have influenced my visual language in a big way for this work. i love the film noir aspect that comes out of a lot of the footage of the crash. this is the back page of the zine, designed as a sort of poster which you only see once you have unfolded all the inside parts of the zine. i hope that by starting with this, the least important part of the zine [in that its purely aesthetic, not much going on literacy-wise] then my style will develop and improve when designing the more crucial parts of the zine.

interrupt.

this is the rest of the intervention project i did. [the first bit was the benefits poster] for the first of my other two interventions i bought some fortune cookies from LIDL, unpackaged them, removed the notes from inside the cookies, replaced them with my own notes, and returned them to the shop. the reason i did this is because i don't like the boring ambiguity of all those messages [in a similar way to horoscopes] and so all of my messages are a play on taking the ambiguity a big step further. they read as follows:

[Insert Fortune Here]

You will have 1/2/3 children with
your beautiful husband/wife

You will find great success in the
design/construction/media/retail industry

Your husband/wife/partner can be found
where you least/most expect it

Look for the positives in your recent loss of
job/a relative/money/possession

A house/flat/cottage in the city/suburbs/countryside
could be the perfect place to settle down.

Look after your friends/family for
they are most dear to you

It is time to stop the smoking/drinking/junk
food and take up golf/tennis/jogging

Your efforts/laziness at work/home will be
noticed and you will be praised/punished

Your friends appreciate you for being the
funny/clever/reliable/outgoing one


For the second one i wanted to take a look at the value of money in the current economic climate [it may sound clever, but i actually know shit all about the economy]. so i figured the best piece of graphic communication to interrupt is the banknote itself. with a simple stamp on every note i come across, my message has a fast and wide circulation. the message was spend it all at once which for me, worked on two levels, one encouraging the holder to go out and spend money in order to stimulate the economy and save our local businesses, but also as a general life lesson to be more reckless and spontaneous with your money, and enjoy spending it.


i've been stamping notes for a few days and intend to continue for a long while as i rather like the idea. as unlikely as it may be, if you ever do come in contact with a note stamped with spend it all at once please please please please please please please please please please please contact me, id love to hear from you!