Design Specialism Reflection & Action Plan

Learning Log/Diary

Graphic Design Specialism & Professional Skills Reflection

Summary Of My Learning From My Module

Responding To Flux

This assessment is about communication, pure and simple.

I'm going to take the word flux (just as a set of letters, regardless of meaning) and communicate the following meanings:

i.   Dysfunctional

ii.  Plastic

iii. Spiky

iv. Flowing

v.  Toxic

Plus another 5 of my own which I have try out more than that, such as:

i.     Fray

ii.    Wither

iii.   Indulgence

iv.   Nature

v.    Elegance

vi.   Fluid

vii.  Ash

viii. Identity

Dysfunctional

"My alarm clock is spoiled..." I can still remember, when I was a secondary school student, alarm clock play an important role in every morning during my school life, it is the best reminder to me. When the mobile or smartphone has begun to replace it's role, I forget the existence value of alarm clock, it was being shelved aside. Until now I found out the alarm clock is no longer rang and in operation. Although the alarm clock is dysfunctional, but it brought me a last function which is being part of the project.

Fray

A frayed jeans does not mean that it cannot be wear anymore. Conversely, if we seen this kind of frayed jeans as one of the new trend, spend a little creativity on it and reinvent it, this pair of jeans will have a different fate. A simple action can grind fonts on jeans, I used comb and blades to accomplish this small design on it.

Wither

A brighter and beautiful flowers will eventually fade. A bouquet of flowers from my boyfriend during Valentine's Day, this is the first year I received flower indeed. Even though it was withered for a long time, but I still keep it for nearly 9 months.  There was a memorable story behind the withered flowers, and it also contribute to become part of my important part in this project.

Indulgence

Everyone has their favorite hot drink, and I was no exception as well. I love Milo, start from my childhood until now, it helps to boost me up everyday. When I having my hot Milo in my room, suddenly I think of one of the designer I research before who used coffee stain to do a portrait, so I pulled 1 piece of tissue and make a Milo stain on it and spread Milo powder to make the word flux, it shows my indulgence towards Milo.

Toxic

Toxic is a poison and dangerous chemical substances, and it comes from a bottle.  

Nature

Die cut on the leaf and make the alphabet, but I was place it on a wrong place -  a fake grass 

Elegance

When we saw a lady wearing a pearl necklace we can feel elegance from her. A pearl is a very precious object in people's eye, I place all the pearl I have on a chair which it will be more suitable to show elegance in photo.

Plastic

I believe we have do collage before, but usually we use paper or magazine to do this, how about plastic bag? A plastic bag can be one of the medium to do a piece of beautiful artwork.

Fluid

Pour the water on the plastic table! Well, this effect is quite weak when I captured the photos, it cannot be read or see also. Any how it is still a good experience and experiment for me, at least I know it does not work well.

Ash

What to do with unused paper? recycle? or like me I turn it into a piece of artwork. One night I was cleaning my room, a bunch of paper being thrown out, I think of why don't I just take a few paper to do an experiment for this project? Seriously, I never burn paper before and I was so surprise after I burned it, I used the ash to sprinkle on a white paper, a paper looks different when we convert it into unusual format.

Spiky

A spiky hair or Durian or needle? I think most of us will appear this images while talking about spiky, but spiky is not that limit. I sharpen my color pencils, stick a blue tap at the bottom of pencil and paste on a paper, it become SPIKY! It is not easy to achieve what I want actually, it is good that when the first time I tried and failed and tried again and success. 

Flowing

There is a small pond with a small waterfall in my house's garden, water flows from top to the pond. I seize the camera and press to shutter to captured the flow of water. Sometimes, if we use different perspective to appreciate an obscure or very ordinary objects, it will become a things that will amaze people. I do not know that an old and fake pond will be showing a beauty side.

Identity

Identity meaning the fact of being who or what a person or thing is. Our hand print, this identity helps illustrate the similarities and differences between how we define ourselves and how others define us.We all have different hand print and identity, and this is ME! A hand print tells my identity.


Reflective Note:

This project did help me think out of box. Although it seems like an easy assessment, just use whatever object or things to arrange the word of flux, indeed it is not. When I first doing this project, I felt that I just need to arrange the word only but I almost neglected I have to communicate the meaning by arranging the word of flux. After I realize my own problem, I listed down all the words which I want to communicate, only I start work on it. It gave me a chance to explore different material and used a normal or ordinary object and make it different. I never thought that a things that surround me were so beautiful when we use another perspective to see it. In addition, I learned not to arrange word in a very neat way but sometimes a nature or an "accident" effect will add value into the artwork as well.

Research On Different Area Of Design

Research

Exhibition

Way Finding

Publication/Book

Publication/Book

Handmade

Handmade

Reflective Note:

This is a small exercise for me to obtain extra or additional knowledge. Research on different design area such as handmade, book, way finding and many more. By doing the research on these areas, I explored different way of design and image making, and now I know design is not all about using design software, drawing or printing but something traditional method or DIY. Actually, I knew all this design method during diploma, unfortunately I neglected what I know when start doing the project, is good for me to pick those knowledge up and use it widely in future.

[WEEK 11] Campaign Logo, Mood Board & App Design Proposal

Campaign Logo

Campaign Logo Design (3 version)

Mood Board

Poster Draft

Mood Board

App Design Proposal

[WEEK 10] Logo Design & Discussion About Campaign

Logo Design

Initial Sketches 

Discussion About Campaign

On last Wednesday class, each of our student come out with different idea on campaign tagline. After discussion, we decided to use "Sharing Is Not FOOL, It Makes You FULL" as our collaborative consumption campaign tagline and we have a sub-tagline for it as well which is "Connecting . Earning . Satisfying". Sharing is not a foolish action which will cause less or deduction, but when people know the beauty of sharing, their life will become multiple. Malaysian are mostly emphasize on their money, we use the point FULL in the tagline to associate with people, this will make a clear picture on when you start sharing, your life will be FULL instead of you think that this is FOOL. We have a sub-tagline here which is an abbreviation of the benefits on sharing, the overall meaning of these 3 points are people start to connecting to other people first and do sharing with them, at the same time people are earning income through sharing their thing. When people obtain what they want, the satisfaction will comes to them. Afterwards, we will need to design a logo for this campaign based on the tagline we set. 

Proceed to next stage, we discuss about the campaign strategies and finally we have a plan on how to run this campaign. There are 2 field we will do for this campaign:

Introduce The Tagline

Make a video/animation (post in Youtube or show on TV)

• Find a narrative in order to addressing the tagline

Info graphic 

• Show the number of people connecting to collaborative consumption
• Sharing services versus income rate (show different types of profit making service and how much they can earn through that service)
• People satisfaction

Sharing Experience

Held A Seminar

• Sharing experience, benefits and types of sharing
• Give a comment card to get feedback after seminar

Online Discussion

• Create a forum in Malaysia

Social Media Page

• Create Facebook page

[WEEK 9] Campaign Strategy, Tagline & Logo Design

Campaign Strategy

Campaign Objective

The objective for this campaign is to change people opinion on the value of sharing by building trust on sharing and create aware on collaborative consumption for people who do not know about sharing business model.

Time Frame and Approach

There are total 7 months for us to prepare and run this campaign. We use 4 months to do our research regarding this campaign, 1 month to run the campaign and do 1 month of post-campaign evaluation. 

Target Audience

The target audience for this campaign will be working adult who are in the age group of 25 – 45 years old with the middle class income level between RM 1000 – RM 5000 and their education level are high school and above. In addition, they must have the IT knowledge and accessibility to technology. 

Messages

In this campaign, we would like to prepare messages to reach and convince our target audience based on our qualitative and quantitative research. Through the interview, we knew that most of the respondents do know about sharing instead of the term collaborative consumption, and they have an experience on sharing their stuff with their friends or siblings no matter they do or do not understand the sharing concept. After we analysis all the primary research data, we found out that people share because it will help them to save cost, they care for their daily expenses in life. Since we know our target audience are care about their money, we decide to choose save cost and increase income as our campaign direction to prepare the message. In order to encourage people start to sharing, we would like to invite a speaker who did sharing in his/her life and used sharing business model to increase his/her income successfully to talk about the benefits of sharing concept that help people to save cost and introduce different types of sharing business model. In addition, we wish to invite two Malaysian to do testimonies and share their experience regarding how they save cost and earn money through sharing. 

Creative

Based on the survey questionnaire we had done, most of our target audience spend more time on connected to internet and social network in their daily life. We plan to advertise our campaign through 2 media which are create a web page and Facebook page to let people access and obtain the information regarding this collaborative consumption campaign. These online sources will help people to understand and read the message clearly through the content we post.  Besides, we will design an interesting print advertisement which able to catch people attention and they recognize and remember it easily after they see the advertisement. We will choose a suitable place where usually our target audience will be and place the advertisement.

Campaign Tagline

Give and Take. Share!

This is a good question. When the moment you give something out, but at the same time you take something from others, do you think you had lost or missing anything in your life? Since this is not a deficit action, take a small step to

You Know What I Mean

This is mainly to create a sense of mystery to aroused curiosity, to make people have a feeling to know and understand more about this campaign. We use this tagline to pretend that people know about something they should know, even they do not know what happen indeed.

Sharing = Gaining 

Sharing doesn't mean minus or less, but it help you gain something at the same time. When people share their things to other people, and know how to make money through sharing, they already gaining the value of sharing and earn money through sharing business.

Sharing Is Not FOOL, It Makes You FULL

Sharing is not a foolish action, it will make your life different when you start sharing, like what this tagline said:"your life will be full." You will have a different life once you know how to share, sharing will help people gain a good value and learn how to earn money by doing good things.

What’s Next? 

After you do sharing, what's next? There are many thing waiting people to explore, it is not enough just to know the term "collaborative consumption", but also how can we start to do sharing, and understand different types of sharing model.

Mind Map & Logo Design

Mind Map

Campaign Logo Initial Sketch

[WEEK 8] Interview Data Analysis & Study Existing Collaborative Consumption Campaign

Interview Data Analysis

Study Existing Collaborative Consumption Campaign

The Clean Air Campaign: Less Traffic, Cleaner Air

The Clean Air Campaign and Georgia Commute Options (formerly through a service known as RideSmart) offer a free service with more than 50,000 potential carpoolers or vanpoolers interested in sharing the ride. People may register themselves through online in the website to get the list of people who lives or works around them. 

They used the methods shown below to encourage people to join this campaign:

• Designed an incentive program for in order to motivate solo drivers to try a clean commute alternative like car pooling, van pooling and riding transit. While people participate, they will earn $3 for each day they use clean commute. When they earn certain level amount of money, they able to upgrade and earn more money and win prizes.
• They provide website for people to register and get the carpoolers and vanpoolers name list and obtain real-time traffic info and assistance. People can find their ride through access this website.
• this campaign provide a online form named "Tell Us Your Story" to allow people give their feedback and opinions after they used this car pooling system.

This campaign is to create awareness of the air quality, due to people nowadays they solo and driving their own car and the gas release from the car will pollute the air. Carpooling is one the good solution for people to participate in, this campaign provide a set of system in order to help people get their easily and safely. In addition, they feel that make a system is not enough yet for this campaign, they add in one program which can let people to earn money through doing carpooling. 

1% Sharing Campaign by The Beautiful Store: Share What We Can Share

The goal of this campaign is to make people realize that sharing does not necessarily require a large sum of money. 1% represent the smallest amount that we can share, encourage people start to share the smallest thing in their life. 

Unlike other campaign that will give out prizes or other things to encourage people to participate in the campaign, they actually use another way to let people to have a chance to share, such as:

• For people who can share their abilities and talents, they will be giving a platform to share the things they have. For example: An entertainer sharing their dancing, singing and other gift, as well as through donations from their performance. 
• People who share unwanted items or other thing, they will receive a thank you card from The Beautiful store. 

The Beautiful Store is taking the lead in public campaign that promote the changes of consciousness and changes of society and people by providing the opportunity to direct participate in recycling environmentally friendly activities, sharing and donation. 1 % sharing campaign is one of the sharing campaign they provide the people to have a opportunity to share what people able to share, there is no requirement, they can choose by their own. The Beautiful Store will plan accordingly based on what kind of sharing people would like to do.

Swhopping Campaign: Give Clothes a Future, Shwop.

Marks & Spencers and Oxfam launched shwopping campaign and they achieve a dramatic reduction the number of clothes sent to landfill in the UK by running this campaign. They resale, reuse and recycled all the clothes, and never send it to landfill. Shwopping become the new way of shopping by bringing your unwanted M&S clothes to Oxfam or by dropping off your old clothes at M&S when you buy something new.

They used the methods shown below to encourage people to join this campaign:

• After people complete a shwop, they can text or scan to enter a weekly prize draw to win a 100 euro M&S gift card.
• Issue voucher which entitled people to have 5 euro off their next purchase of 35 euro or more on clothing, home and beauty products per visit and per shwop.
• Register with M&S on Facebook to earn points each time when people shwop and get the prizes.

Marks & Spencers and Oxfam are perfect partner. They launched this campaign to help in recycle, resold and reuse all the unwanted clothes by making it into another items, resale the same brand clothes in store and use the clothes to make and design another clothes. They put a drop box in the M&S store for people to drop all the unwanted clothes and send it to Oxfam for further processing it. 

REFLECTIVE NOTES:

There are many ways to create an effective campaign. Based on different issues and topic, people have trying their best by using different methods such as giving prize to encourage people to participate in order to make our life and environment better. I found out that it is not easy to launch a campaign, we need to do a deep research before we begin it. We need to know the reason we doing this campaign, find a suitable and approachable target audience, the elements that can support the campaign,how this campaign will help people, social, environment and etc. We have to put many thought on it and discuss all the detail about the campaign with our team members. Through all the findings here, I can see there are many things we can learn from each campaign, no matter they are success or failed, these are all the lesson we should learn before we really start to do the campaign. 

[WEEK 7] Existing Collaborative Consumption Campaign

Global Sharing Day

Global Sharing Day helps to address the over-consumption and mass-consumerism of today's age by encouraging people to share, swap, borrow, barter and reuse their items, skills, tools, knowledge and time. 

“Waste becomes Resource” Campaign: Collaborative Consumption

How can we stop to produce so much rubbish and consume more products that are packaged in a sustainable way? There must be a way to solve these problem, which collaborative consumption could be one very powerful answer.

Anabada Campaign

Anabada Campaign encouraged actions ‘save, share, change, and reuse’ campaign - held in 1997 in order to overcome economic depression. The campaign started because people back then wanted to escape the IMF crises themselves. Collaborative consumption is also focusing on these four categories of the Anabada campaign. We can enjoy living with this wind with other people by sharing.

Let's Collaborate!

The Let’s Collaborate! launch event showcased a variety of local sharing economy organizations in New York and discussed whether New York is ripe for such a movement, what barriers exist (and how to overcome them), and insights into their different business models. 

"Swopping" Campaign

Shwopping encourages consumers to bring in unused items of clothing with them to an M&S store when they are making their next purchase, which will be donated to Oxfam. This initiative serves its purpose in raising awareness of wasteful habits and hopefully will lead to step changes in the way society reuses and recycles clothing.

Poster (Try Out)

1st Poster

2nd Poster

Poster Mood Research & Sketches

Vintage Paper Texture and Smart Phone 

Apps Icon and People Holding Smart Phone 

Initial Sketches

Poster Layout

Final Sketch

Understanding & Awareness of Flux in Editorial Design (Magazine)

Understanding

Magazine was published based on people’s interest. Gentleman’s Magazine is the first magazine in the world which edited by Edward Cave. He created a monthly digest of news and commentary on any topic the educated public might be interested in. 

Magazines have been transformed from paper-based publication to interactive-based publication. In addition, there are many famous magazines company have their production line in other country in order to launch overseas editions. 

Harper’s Bazaar, the oldest fashion magazine in the world, they have printed and online edition; and smartphone app is available now. It was one of the magazine that launch overseas editions in different country.


Although this is the age of new technology  but there are people who still enjoy reading magazine in print, the printed copy may not in demand comparing to before, but print will not die.

Awareness

There are people predicted that printed magazine is dead due to technology development and people lifestyle change and only read magazine through online to access instant information but there are still printed magazine around us, maybe the sales number will drop but printed magazine never die.

Beside the development of technology, the variety of magazine become more and more than past. Previously, we only have magazine about fashion, business, celebrity, and travel, compare to now we have different genre of magazine to catch to people hobby and interest such as fishing, sports and parenting magazines.

People are too rely on technology compare to old generation and they neglected the value of printed magazines just because people have busy lifestyle now.

Smart phone or internet is a great tool, and it bring new possibilities in magazine production, but it cannot replace the feeling of paper between our fingers, when we touch the paper, we feel more connected than using electronic devices. 

4 Key Areas of Changes in Editorial Design (Magazine)

Technological Change

• The first black and white magazine: Gentleman's Magazine was printed in 18th century.
• Movable type, only one color printing, print on normal paper.
• In addition, printing cost was high, the number of printed copies was in a small amount, due to impossible to squeeze a larger amount of paper through the machine.
• There is no computer and everything like visual or images was done manually.
• In the early 19th century, the first high quality printed magazine was published, which is a business magazine - Fortune, with pages in full color.
• Magazine include text, images and photos.
• Publisher print magazines on glossy paper rather than paper that previously used.
• The printing machine able to produce large amount of magazine and it has shorten the production time.
• Design software such as Adobe Illustrator, Photoshop and In Design have been created to help designers in designing the magazine layout and modify images without do things manually.
• In the wake of time changing and the rapid development on new technology, Internet become an important new information medium in our life.
• With the demand of people finding information / reading online publishers start to publish the online copy of magazine, which is electronic magazines (E-zines).
• E-zines contains a stylized mixture of content convey in an interactive way.
• Print magazine also has an electronic edition, such as National Geographic and People.
• There are also e-mail newsletters, which people can subscribe. 
• Digital magazines with rich, uncompromising , real-time content comer the market on delivering what we need to know right now.
• Print publications already under siege by the internet and 24 hours news cycle.
• Editorial content not only move online and shrinking to fit computer screen, it even smaller for PDAs and 140 words tweet. 
• Smartphone or devices raised up such as I phone, I pad, Samsung and many others.
• These smart electronic devices became a great tool to help people access internet and obtain information easily on people’s palm.

Cultural Change

• There are many magazines published in different country. The way and concept they applied to design a magazines are different from each others.
• The content and elements of art that use in the magazine are based on country’s culture.
• For example, European modern art movement like Art Decor, Cubism and Surrealism were major influenced on the editorial style in U.S. Magazine.
• In the 19th century, magazines have the power to influenced people’s thinking and behavior.
• Elle magazine was launched and it greatly changed the way women think, speak and perceive themselves. This magazine instructed French women how to be attractive and nice.
• Every country have their unique culture, and this culture will show in magazine through the color, language, pattern and images they applied in magazine. 
• In the 18th century, people read magazines in order to satisfy their interest.
• It is a trend people reading magazine. They read magazine to obtain the information they wish to know.
• In the society today, people read magazine for leisure purpose.
• Instead of buy a printed magazine, many people prefer to use their computer, smart phone or tablet to access the information and visuals that they would like to look in.
• Due to high technology devices occupied our life and people with busy lifestyle, people change their behavior towards read magazine online than printed magazine.

Social Change

• People start to read magazine not because of daily news. Magazines provide people the information that they are interest in.
• Different genre of magazines satisfied people’s needs and interest.
• Many people choose to read magazines instead of reading a book in past time, one of the important reason is those attractive and colorful images implanted in magazines or for specific knowledge and updates.
• Due to Industrial Revolution, magazine has become common and affordable, therefore more and more people were willing to purchase and read magazines.
• People read magazine to keep themselves up to date, for personal interest, self-help and for entertainment.
• Magazine is a kind of leisure publications for people to read interesting content.
• Usually, people read magazine during their recess time or free time. Reading magazine become a way for them to relax themselves.
• Besides, people wish to know something that they curious and find their answer through reading magazine, for example current society fashion trend and movie news.
• In the 21st century, people like holding all information on their hand and stay at their home without going out to explore and gain knowledge.
• Due to the benefits using smart electronic devices and internet to read magazine online, people start to neglected printed magazine.
• Now, people can subscript to e-zines, and read their favorite magazine online.
• Instead of waiting for the printed issues to be delivered to book store or house, they can now read online magazine with instant access.
• People with the busy lifestyle today, they have a more convenience way to obtain information immediately without going  to book store and find the magazine, which is more time saving.
• Based on some people saying that, one of the advantage they found in reading magazine online is they can save space for physical storage at home.
• Even though reading magazine online is easy and able to access information quickly, but people will feedback that their eyes will feel tired.
• There are people still stand in front of the magazine area and spent their time to read printed magazine. 

Contextual Change

• Magazines are form by combining of design elements, such as Language, Type Face, Visuals, Color, Layout and etc.
• Previously, magazines contain formal information like social news, poetry and stories.  
• The genre and topics of magazines have been changing , there are more variety now based on people interest , lifestyle, needs, and trend in the community and generation.
• Magazine publishers have their own company and industry in their own country.
• Magazines were launched to other country as well.
• For some famous magazine company, they also establish their production line or office in another country.
• They also sold their production line to the existing company in that country to publish same brand and name’s magazine in their country.
• These magazine called overseas edition magazine.
• Overseas Edition Magazine contain some content or news that is from their main company in original country, but the magazine will be localizes.
• Designer and editor localizes the magazine by put in local news, the style of images and photos by follow the country culture and change the language.