My collaboration project with Farsya was intended to be a break from strictly 'graphic design' The brief included the exploration and experimentation with ceramics and wooden work and their various methods including hand sculpting and using laser print and heat press to create a design on a t-shirt.
The campaign is geared towards youths; besides being the future of our planet, they are still in the ‘learning’ stage of their lives, which makes them easier to influence. Plus, it is easier to understand how to impact them when you are one of them. For the overall designing strategy, we intended on combining both our opposing creative styles. My creative style is more ‘feminine’ and cute, while Farsya prefers the opposite. So we compromised by making a more ‘adorable’ version of our concepts (example: our mascot being a cheerful deer that is shot in the head with its’ brains leaking out, to show how unaware they are of their future and how they are living creatures that are similar to humans.
From surveying our audience, we noticed that people do not engage visuals that are ‘disgusting’ or ‘scary’ and designs that are too ‘serious’ or verbose. This gave us more of a reason to make our designs friendly and approachable. Also, our strategy is to keep things vague, so this leaves the audience imagining the more ‘gruesome’ reality and imagery for themselves, whilst not being bombarded with information. For our logo, we wanted to design something simple and easy to recognize, but also ‘trendy’ (professional with an ‘edge’). The thought process was similar to the brand name, it is meant to be short and catchy but also questions the viewers leading them to think more about the matter at hand. It does not ‘force’ a message but subtly suggests a memorandum. We chose a deer as a mascot as they are titled ‘the king of the forest’ and stands as a representative of all the animals being killed for fur or skin. At the same time, we find their gentle and majestic appearance very visually appealing.
Advertising poster-wise, we used that cute and lovable factor to lure millennials’ attention (it is a fact that adorable animal visuals are extremely popular on the Internet). The layout design is inspired by typical magazine designs to link the end product or fashionable purposes of these horrific killings of animals.
Working with Farsya was very beneficial for me as she is a Visual communication student and has skills in a ceramics/ wood and metal work. I wanted to put a 3D element into our campaign, our mascot was made into a ceramics sculpture to possibly be displayed in art exhibitions and be sold out on our created mockup website to raise awareness. On top of that, our designs were printed on t-shirts, bags, enamel mug made into stickers and other ‘common’ objects youths seem to like, to further promote the campaign and perhaps widen scope of audience. We have also created a pin badge made of wood. We used wood as is symbolizes power and courage also deer's environment which is a forest.
There were plenty of problems throughout the brief, the main one being that the ceramics continued to break, due to the thinness of antlers. However, even though a lot of the forms were unsuccessful, but in the end, we managed to create a pleasing ceramics sculpture. Working with clay was really natural and enjoyable for me, and took me outside the studio for a while. The other problem which we had was with the woodwork mainly because we were both not very skilled at the adobe illustration, so we didn't know how to perfectly prepare the design to be sent to the laser printer. After a couple of tries and with the help of the tutor we have created pin badges in the way we wanted it to be.
Overall I very enjoyed working with a different discipline and combining it with graphic design, and with a student from Visual Communication. I feel I gained a lot of skills in terms of ceramics and wooden work. Nevertheless, the collaboration and communication between me and Farsya were sufficient as we worked very well. We didn't decide on who is doing what, we both were working together on everything sharing and teaching each other different skills. To conclude I would collaborate with Farsya again in the future.
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