Rationale

We are doing the beach clean-up. Our rhetorical approach is satire. The core message of our poster is for everyone to ‘clean up their act’ because we are impacting our wild/marine life. We want everyone to come together as a community. By having an illustrative visual style, we have reinforced our rhetoric approach. Our target audiences are teenagers, university students and adults that relate to this sort of humor. By saying ‘Yo Beach’ we are being provocative.

The flyer is our ‘happy ending’. The back details are according to the fact it is a memento for the participants after the beach clean-up. Just how we want people to participate in the clean-up, we wanted to make the flyer more interactive and fun. By using decal stickers on bins it would draw more attention to the bins and encourage people to use them more.

Final Submission

We have now finished and printed our whole assignment. We are happy with our end result and think that all of the pieces are successful and work well together. We have altered everything so all the colours and styles are consistent throughout all of the forms of media. We have refined our type and now think that the layouts are easily readable and are flowing well.

Progress & Refinement

Over the week, we have developed our flyer further by having removable tabs on the flyer. The buoys are gone and now it does connect back to the poster. The website is fully functional as of now, but we do need to add in the 3 downloadable imagery once we have finalised each thing. The poster is still being refined by playing with the type aesthetics and colour. After this we decided we would go out and treat ourselves with ice cream…

Feedback

From today's class we have been given feedback that our trans media projects don't connect as well as they should.

The Poster:
The tagline needs to tie in with the overall imagery. We could write something along the lines, 'because our animals are suffering because of us.. come together as a community and join our beach clean up where there is no price for enjoyment.' We also need to think about the placement of the extra trash. and the placement and sizing of our type.

The Flyer:

The buoys don't set in with the other pieces, like the poster and website. There become too many metaphors overall so we don't even need to incorporate them. We will need to work on the overall layout. We are now thinking of making flaps that tear open revealing the tips with just numbers on them. The background and type logo work fine as a whole which brings all our trans-media things together.

Now it is just more about the refinement and how we connect everything together.

Poster Refinement

Working to a grid makes it much more easier to display information. We just have to decide what we really want to show and what is more important. We need to pay more attention to the hierachy of information in relation to the image.

 

Still kind of feels it's all over the place. We will be refining everything till the end anyway. We just need to prioritise information.

The "Other" Thing

For our other thing, we were thinking of designing a beach bag, beach towel or t-shirt. In the end we decided to design a bin as this is central to our theme. Early on we decided that not enough bins were central to the beach litter problem, and this will help solve the problem. On the website, the file will be for a bin decal, as people obviously can't download a bin :)

Website Development

I have been developing the website. The main problem I had is trying to make a readable website when I am use to designing for print. I have also had a problem trying to simplify the site, as it was turning out too busy. I have had to experiment with the font sizes and grid to try to get it right. I have enjoyed learning how to code and trying to pick up the different ways of composing a layout using coding.

Flyer Development

Initially I just drew up some compositional concepts of what we wanted our poster to show and how. Instead of having a normal checklist we wanted to make it interesting or even have some info graphics.

When I think of tips to help reduce litter, i also think of the 'lifesaver' dingy thing. Instead of having the seagull on the flyer as well we decided to use a different character.

The development and ideation is all in the workbook. Not sure about the feedback we will get but I like where the flyer is heading. We have decided not to go ahead with info graphics but instead try and make the top tips more appealing to the audience/viewer.

So far it is out of these three layouts. After feedback from class we will see which one to further develop and refine. Maybe we don't even need the lifesaver behind the starfish?

Character Development

I have been developing characters to put on our designs. We tried several styles, but settled on a flat colour, cartoony style done on Illustrator. To create these characters I first drew it in pencil, and then scanned the file and traced it in Illustrator. We believe these characters bring humour to our design and are a stand out feature.

Original Sketches

Final Characters

Poster Development

After finalising our visual character style, we went onto developing our poster compositionally with the other details. At first we wanted to use all three characters but it began to look over crowded. We also tried to incorporate the 'texture' smoke but that didn't fit in with our visual style. We got rid of the crab and starfish to make the seagull the main aspect of the poster. We are still hung up on the tagline for the poster. We have tried to see what works but it's a bot hard. Here are some tag lines we have tried:

• This isn’t natural, clean up the beach.
• We don’t need your stinkin’ trash
• isn’t this what you wanted?
• We have feelings too.
• Your trash is our problem.
• Put litter in it’s real place.
• Keep it classy, Keep it clean
• Keep your bad habits to yourself
• Clean it up, its your dooty

Now the poster looks more like this compositionally. The smoke from the cigarette is more subtle and text may also be overlaid without it being confusing. Still need to keep refining the proportions and now add all the details.

Idea Refinement

Today in class we refined the idea of the smoking bird that we had in interim. We have received feedback telling us that the bird would better convey our idea if he looked like he was a slob. We have been trying to find a illustration style that we can pull off that will show this idea of a slobby bird, while still being fun and eye catching to draw attention. We are also thinking of developing different animals in the same style.

Styles

Interim

UNDERSTAND/ IDEATE/ CREATE/ CRITIQUE

Since our moodboards we have established our 'style' from the moodboards which is a retro and an illustrative style. We began making mock ups of our thumbnails and had 'mini' critiques on which ones worked with our peers. We decided to carry on with the idea of the smoking bird and mermaid and the idea of the footprints. 

 

From the interim the smoking bird works best and has a sort of quirkiness to it. We will further need to develop the use of type and composition. Maybe the bird could be situated on a wooden pillar so it isn't just floating mid air. Or what if we use a different background? 

Another point is that we need a type logo that can be placed on the other trans-media parts so they look like a collective. 

                                                                                                                                                     - Richie

Initial Visualized Concept

A.K.A THUMBNAILING

During class we had many cool sand different ideas. From the thumbnails ideated, we figured we would go for an ironic/comic approach.  We want to get many thumbnails done in order for us to have more options when we choose which ones to carry on with and develop.

Here our our thumbnails so far. For the interim we are thinking to develop, the smoking bird idea, the mermaid smoking, the ice cream melting to reveal rubbish/ ice cream cone holding rubbish and the idea of embedded human rubbish footprints.

Beach Exploration

At first we just researched the different beaches and figured out what was different between them. We chose Petone Beach because it was more central to where we live and we know that many different types of people go there. For example; fishermen, dog walkers, swimmers, families, students etc. That beach probably requires the most cleaning anyway.

Before beginning to think about the actual poster, we needed to visualise what 'things' could portray the beach and how. We listed items we may like to incorporate in our poster. For example; ice cream, jandals, shells etc. To get a deeper understanding we did some rubbings of shells and a drawing of the wharf in Petone. The word exercise in class made it easier to make things more metaphoric and challenge our thinking.

Moodboards

We have created moodboards for the beach context, beach design, styles, clean up design and the target audience. Through these moodboards we are trying to establish a specific tone that our work will take as we continue on the design process. These moodboards will be used to inspire us in the future, when we are in need of deign direction and fresh ideas.

-Shanna

Research

We have begun to gather different research resources such as drawings & rubbings to gain a better understanding of our topic. So far our mission has been to gather visual references we can use when designing and creating our web hub and materials. I think we have a lot of visual material now which will help us along the way when making decisions, it's just a matter of developing auntie we get a solution.

We have our own tasks to do, so more research can be done within the time given. Tomorrow we will probably bring our research together and discuss our ideas with one another along with updating our workbook. 

               

Getting Started

We have decided to go with the "Clean up our Coastline" topic. We both love the idea of using the beach in our designs and think that we can create some awesome designs.
At the moment we are looking at images to inspire us as we start to come up with design ideas. These images include images of the beach, objects associated with the beach, sea animals, beach textures, beach themed graphic design and existing beach clean up advertising. We have been keeping a Pinterest board to collect these images. http://www.pinterest.com/tercleod/beach-moodboard/

We have also been coming up with ideas for our designs. At the moment these ideas have a whimsical feel, with ideas that personify animals, contain the world in claimshell and ideas that feature fairy tale princesses.

-Shanna