Week Two

Session two


Today we continued to create ideas and concept, doing mock-ups of our ideas and making some of our best thumbnails into bigger and better rendered concepts. This of course is also a vital stage of designing and necessary to working out which of your thumbnails work on a bigger scale and which do not.

This is one of my thumbnails I felt looked good, so I blew it up and printed it out

I painted over it with dramatic reds and a contrasting blue

Then used generic symbols of death as the iris

As these were just rough concepts let's ignore the fact that the digital icon cut-outs clash terribly with the painted eye and just focus on the idea. While I thought this looked pretty good and eye-catching at thumbnail size it's not nearly as impactful as I'd hoped on a bigger scale. For starters, the eye doesn't actually represent homelessness so without context, the viewer would be clueless. The whole 'death symbol as the iris' thing is pretty overdone and generic. So a failed experiment really, but a good one. I've got that out the way now I can focus on bigger and better. 

During my research I came across a fact that really jumped out at me. The mortality rate of homeless people. People who sleep rough have a life expectancy of 39 years. That's crazy! 

This information was actually from an American website and I literally couldn't find any stats on mortality in NZ. In fact the best info I found on New Zealand homelessness was that there wasn't enough info on New Zealand homelessness. 

It's apparently not enough of an issue to collect solid data. 

But anyway, I wanted to try and illustrate that. It had an emotional impact on me so I tried to translate that into imagery. 

The homeless person sleeping on the street in a body bag rather than a sleeping bag:

On a similar note I wanted to capture a clear combination of death and homelessness. So I had the torn socks and dirty feet with a post mortem tag. The class had some interesting feedback on this one. They seemed to get the intent of my message straight away which is always a good sign. And added that the fact there was nothing written on the tag struck a chord with them too, noting that this could be a symbol that the dead homeless person is anonymous, has no one and is considered no one.

Over all I'm not hugely happy with any of my designs so far. I feel like I really need to get back to the drawing board, look for further inspiration and brainstorm better concepts.