• Me and Lorna decided to ‘pop’ into Hobbycraft after some coffee and cake yesterday. Obviously we had to buy everything that was completely unnecessary.
    Pro-Markers are now £3.99 though, so if you need to complete your collection, now is the time.
    We came across some printing mail stamps too, which will come in handy for my social Mail project, and the design of the pitching document. I am planning on creating this as a mail parcel piece, so this was a great find and they print perfectly too. We both came out with massive bags of stuff, and the total cost of everything made me decide at the till that I can no longer spend anything for a year, although it is all worth it. I have always been obsessed with buying lots of stationary equipment, this is all I asked for every birthday, my family thought I was weird to say the least… 










  • Our entire society is based primarily on rampant over-consumption (known to the media as consumerism).This continues to proceed at a completely non-sustainable level.
    Everything that is bought has an impact on the environment. Highlighting the environmental and ethical consequences of consumerism, within developed countries only 20% of the world population are consuming over 80% of the earth's natural resources, and this is causing a disproportionate level of environmental damage, and an unfair distribution of wealth.
    Buy Nothing Day highlights the environmental and ethical consequences of consumerism. This takes place internationally on the 26th November, and is a day is aimed to challenge consumers to switch off from shopping and tune into life, do something different, and not buy a thing for 24 hours. It is aimed to be a complete detox from shopping.
    100% of consumers that were asked on the high street if they had heard of Buy Nothing Day answered no. Further, when asked if they had any idea what this day was about, all were curious to know, but guessed this was a day where you could not buy anything, but had no specific understanding of why.

    “Is this something religious?”

    “I can guess it is something related to saving the environment?” 

    My approach to advertise Buy Nothing Day, and so that more consumers understand the purpose of this day, is to simply educate those about Buy Nothing Day, and to focus on the main reasons for this day. 
    Everything we buy has an effective impact on the environment. My concepts  highlight the environmental consequences of consumerism. It is important to highlight such changes and that they are a continuous problem. It is important to get consumers to understand about these crucial changes and its impact on the environment. It is also important that these changes need to be put into effect for more than one day. 
    I want to create something that will educate and get consumers to act.  

    Concept 1- Buy Nothing Day Guide
    The idea of the ‘Buy Nothing Use Something’ is a newspaper full of ideas and tips on how to make things out of ‘nothing’. My target audience for this is 30- 60 year olds.
    The idea of this is, anything can be made out of recycled products or old pieces of material, and this guide will allow them to explore with the use of their old ‘junk’ and create something new and worth using, rather than going out and buying something new. This guide is sure to keep my target audience occupied with a monthly subscription full of new tasks and tips, and the reader will also have the opportunity to send in a piece of work created using old pieces of material and the winner will be the cover star.  Readers will also be given the opportunity to send in their own tips to share with other readers.


    Concept 2- Guerilla Advertising
    Through the use of guerilla advertising, I will grab the attention of women shoppers. A recent study by researchers from Newcastle University's found that three-quarters of women are responsible for the shopping of food in their households. “The study of nearly 200 British men and women in their early 30s found that, although half of the women worked full time, they were still responsible for this aspect of family life.” The pink feminine bag through the use of the linguistic message will imply that the woman holding the bag in the advert is destroying the environment. The viewer will want to read more deeply into this, and question why this woman is destroying the environment. This is where within the magazine spread, an explanation will be offered. This campaign will also include clothes labels which will ask the consumer if they ‘really need to buy the product’ as a way of communicating with them and to get the consumer to think whether or not they really need the product. The use of guerilla advertising will grab the attention in a memorable way and will draw immediate attention. 

    Concept 3  - Public Awareness Campaign
    An earlier experiment with typography in the environment and only using free and natural resources to create this typography was proven to show that it attracted the public’s attention. Passers-by would stop to talk and ask about the typographic pieces, and genuinely shown an interest to the work. The key thing I learnt from this was, if I was able to grab an audience’s attention, using this technique for experimental purposes, no doubt would I be able to grab their attention to create a public awareness campaign for Buy Nothing Day. A campaign that could grab the public’s attention but mainly, one that would also communicate a message and make that connection for the consumer to want to know more about cutting down on buying excessively, but to also teach them why.

    This received a positive reaction off the public, they were curious to know more about what I was doing. Most people stopped to look, took photographs and asked questions and this gave me the opportunity to talk to the public and answer questions about Buy Nothing Day and allow them to understand the meaning and reason behind this.






















  • After experimenting with typography in the environment a while back, I had quite a positive reaction from the public whilst doing this. I am currently working on an advertising awareness campaign for Buy Nothing Day, something I have expanded on after working on designing a symbol to represent this day for the Creative Times. After combing both of the research I had found from both of my two previous research projects, I have combined both to lead me to come up with these concepts.
    My first concept is about attracting an audience and making the public aware of Buy Nothing Day, after going on the high street and asking members of the public what they knew about this day, I learnt that most people were unaware about this day, or importantly the reasons behind this. The idea behind this concept was to create something without buying anything. “Use something. Buy nothing.” The public reaction was quite different to the reaction I had received after my first experiment. This actually meant something, and the public were curious to know more about this. I had polices officers stopping to talk, Cheshire council and a range of different ages approaching this and talking about it. One man accused me of intending to create ‘war’ because it was a strong political statement. The idea behind this was to make people aware about high consumerism and environmental issues, and get the public to react to this by using something they already have instead of buying anything unless they really need to. Otherwise the public’s reaction was quite positive and the police and council wished me good luck with my project. I was really interesting to have the pubic ask questions and want to know more about this, and using this opportunity to explain about this day, and it was great to hear members of the public saying they will definitely act on this and take on board what I had told them, others photographed the process on their mobile too, and people who had walked past during the initial stages of this development, promised they would come back to see the end process, and it was nice to see them come back to talk about this and show an interest.

    More importantly, this had a much greater impact on the public whilst I was creating this than it did after it poured down with rain and I had took shelter. Without me there, the public just walked past this or on most occasions over it. I learnt that this campaign would not work as a stand-alone typographic piece, which I had initially intended to create. I learnt the public only wanted to question it and want to learn about this day, and show interest whilst I was with it, the public acted curious as to what I was doing, this was seen as something different. Yet, without me there, this was seen almost as an ‘everyday’ thing. I learnt this concept is going to need so much more than I had initially thought, although finally I loved doing this and I got so much out of it to move on and continue working on expanding this concept.







  • Nobody wants a sugar monster in the studio do they?
    I must admit, I do probably have more sugars in my cup of tea than I actually should? This goes back to when I worked at Wildfire Creative initially on placement, but then continued also throughout the summer. Here I was known as the ‘Sugar Monster’.  I must admit I have always found it embarrassing when people ask me how many sugars I have in my tea, or “how much tea in my sugar!”
    Now it is coming towards the end of my degree, and a time when we will all be starting our careers, I have decided I want to become a normal tea drinking person.
    As a result from this day forward I am completely cutting down on the amount of sugar I have in my tea, especially now that I will be joining Entyce Creative in June.

    Just to add; I have tracked how much tea I have had in one day, and in total this worked out to be

    a total of 32 spoons of sugar in one day. I don’t think this is that bad though, but apparently it is? I definitely do admit it is not normal to carry around sachets of sugar in my purse though (in case of an emergency I tell myself).


  • For my dissertation, I decided to focus on advertising (At the start of the year this was something I wanted to specialise in) although, things have moved on and through the MA I will be investigating Branding. Biggest regret now for not choosing my topic on branding; however I did still enjoy my topic and felt I definitely learnt a lot from this.

    I chose to discuss through my dissertation how advertising has changed from the 1950s to today. This is obviously a very broad subject, therefore I cut it down to investigate the changes within the cosmetics industry and how women were reflected through the marketing of cosmetics through three brands; Revlon,  Max Factor and Maybelline.
    To begin with I discussed cosmetics during the Victorian era, and discovered how this had developed from this to the mass production of cosmetics and the start of the department store.
    I then went on to discuss social changes and the effects as a result of the Women's Liberation Movement, and discussed the changes that took place in the 1960s. Including this, I learnt there were changing trends within cosmetics throughout the decades, and looked at how this affected the marketing of cosmetics, and what this meant for women during these times. I did this through deep analysis of semiotics and an investigation into the beauty myth throughout my chosen advertisements.


  • Last week me and David went in and did some screen printing. We had decided to use our original Rain Posters that we had designed for a D&AD brief to promote rain. David’s was much more complicated than mine, and involved (if I can remember eight colours and screens) I, however chose to stick with one colour to begin with.
    I was not completely happy with my outcome. In order to get my print I had used a photocopy, so it had lost some of the quality, but it was worthwhile learning how to do this process and this is something I can work on improving for next time.

    Want to see some more Rain Posters? Check out Lorna's and Alice's too! They're awesome. It's really nice to see how we all decided to approach this.

     

     [Below - The start of David's design]



     [Below - My design]





  • My new business cards arrived yesterday including my new identity. Below is a promotional pack I have just finished which can be sent to potential employers which includes my CV, portfolio book of a style of my work in the style of the (CR Monograph) and a business card inside including my contact details.