Self Aware Design

After more consideration, I think my work can be described as ‘self-aware design’, finding a term for my work may help me in the future, perhaps finding more examples of this being created or for creatin a more concise message when presenting my work.

After research I have found my work exists in very close proximity to ‘AdBusters’ a very well-known movement that works to attempt to stop people from buying so many unneeded products in their lives. This presents a problem that needs to be solved, and I think that an effective way of beating the competition and making my work stand out is to research the messages behind ad busters and seeing what about their work is similar to mine, and then finding a section that I can delve further into that will set my work, and ad busters apart, giving viewers a reason to view my designs over the previous works of organisation like ad busters.

After deconstruction of ad busters, what they do as well as how they do it. I have found that what we are doing is not the same, but the similarities within the ‘how they are doing it’ section are very similar, this means that I need to find a unique point within this section and then push my work further in this direction.

As I am focussing on the visuals of the ad much less than ad busters, the focus on a typographical approach could be focused upon further. A message of ‘buying the typeface, not the product’ interests me, the focus on typography would set my work apart from ad busters as well as allow me to continue to exert my design skills in order to create designs that are flush with fidelity and could still exist within professional grade fashion and lifestyle magazines.

A change in the slogans as well as a larger focus on the typographic elements could see the introduction of slogans such as:

This typeface is only £49, why pay £699 for this?

The visual language of typeface advertisments is prevelent, and can be found quickly on website like behance for research.

A secondary concept could be focussing in more on the idea of masculine and feminine, this has been explored in little detail previously in my first round of experimentation for my faux fashion adverts. The copy writing systems and slogans used previously could be utilised here, the standard looking fashion typefaces used could also be used to help represent femininity, and a bolder, sans serif font could represent masculinity. I could include elements of subversion by having people recognise those stereotypical aspects of the adverts first, then allowing the message the text itself says to say something unexpected and therefore, allow subversion to occur.

I think my second concept has more potential, the first idea would be more specialise, for example if I were to be aiming my designs at those within the design community, the general public may find it harder to recognise the visual language that is associated with typeface advertisements, and thus would spoil the reveal aspect if the more emotional side of viewers brains do not recognise the ads before they are able to read what the text says and examine the advertisement in full.

Moving further into the second concept, the stereotypical ideas of masculinity and femininity in design are very well researched and extremely well replicable. This concept could be toyed with from a design perspective while remaining in the context of fashion, in general the more branded and often feminine a product is, the more expensive that product will be. The concept could be creating two adverts, both for the same product but having the more branded alternative be marked up at a much higher price, this rather implicitly deals with the issue at hand. Without literally having to say “this typeface makes the product expensive” I would still be able to translate this idea to the viewer, and still have a reveal aspect. Hopefully the viewer would recognise the product in both adverts and they’re own reactions to the pricing of it when scrolling through the magazine would make my concept and the designs a successful critical outcome.