Further Concepts & Refining

Inital Concepts

Through extensive research and brainstorming I have a large number of initial concepts that show promise, as my three strong concepts presentation is very soon I know need to decide which of these are the most successful and then proceed to refine them with visuals before presenting them to my tutor, mentor and client.

Conversation is clearly a key topic of my concepts, particularly the conversation that is not being had. How do I then bring people to have this conversation and consider it in their everyday lives?

One of my concepts is creating a social media campaign titled #YouToUs, Whereby individuals would share their stories and their cycles online, this would allow for others to bring in their own stories and reflect on them, a large number of these stories and cycles being share would result in many people conversing, comparing and sharing what they have to say in a safe online space, an option of anonymity would be considered to being with in order to encourage the first groups of people to become involved, there wouldn’t be many people who would want to be first in exposing how they feel about this topic.

Making something that acts as a platform for people to share would be good, however it would perhaps have adverse side effects with the potential of hiding these stories in this corner of the internet, and not getting it into the public eye where it is needed.

A concept brought on from my research and the lack of data I have noticed would be to highlight this lack of research by expressing my visual and typographic systems in a distorted manor, reducing the amount of visible visuals based on the amount of missing data is present within the statistic I am expressing

The use of a clock representing the menstrual cycle could be a strong concept, this would allow for large amounts of information design to be incorporated around the imagery of a clock, it would also create the basis for a motion design based movement, comparing the duration of cycles to the number of hours moved on this “menstrual clock”. However, I feel this may become emotionless and be too focused on the information, not the people it is hoping to empower and educate.

A concept of “Sparking” a conversation, using sparks and speech marks near form the logo marque would create interesting, varied visuals as well as helping to provide a context for me to express my information design in. A clear context would be this concept of electricity or sparks, using this as a basis for my data visualisation. and information design would help me move away from the slightly cliched approach of blood reds and uterus diagrams often seen in previous attempts at breaking down this stigma.

The concept of using a “.” period mark in correlation with the actual word period presents interesting opportunities to encourage people to speak and share statements and stories relating to their experiences. While this use of period and speech marks would be interesting, the use of speech marks as a logo or as a visual system has been done many times before and even used heavily in the design document examples provided for this project by my tutors, if I were to choose this idea as one of my three strong concepts, it would need much further refinement in order to give it a unique and interesting spin as to differentiate it from what has been made previously.

Reflections

I feel the use of Ink and Menstrual products combined would make for an interesting visual language, it would need further development as to not simply be writing on pads. However after further thought this concept does not seem to move further than this idea, it seems more a clever gimmick that an actual concept for live changing campaigns, perhaps this will be adapted and will manifest itself in another idea in the future with more longevity.

Moving on, while the use of period and speech marks themselves are already often used within stigma related campaigns, the use of punctuation and typographic glyphs does interest me, there is a very large number of glyphs available to me and so I do not want to write this idea off yet, a simply believe there is room for improvement before this becomes a viable concept.

Finally the idea of using missing visuals and type to express a lack of research is very interesting, if executed well it could make for unique visuals that attract lots of attention as well as carry a strong and memorable message, however how this would be made into an entire brand rather than just a dingle visual would require further thought but as a base concepts i think it would benefit from visual and typographic examples being created

My other concepts seem to be merely logo ideas or concepts that could be incorporated into my three main concepts here. And so I believe these three ideas will be put forward for further development, and then presented with more detail as my “Three Strong Concepts” presentation, after my clients and tutors thoughts on these concepts I will then begin to create my final concept that uses all the positives of my ideas, allowing for the negatives to be removed.