Let's get socio-political...

So the next project is a poster design to raise awareness of a current socio-political issue, with ethical graphic design agency Zerofee. I've shortlisted 3 potential issues:

1. Abortion Rights for Women in Northern Ireland

I was interested and surprised to learn that, despite being UK citizens and taxpayers, it is essentially impossible for women in Northern Ireland to get an abortion - they are forced to spend their own money travelling to England or further afield to get access to treatment. This campaign seems to have gained momentum in recent months and so could be an interesting issue to tackle. I guess it would be an awareness-raising poster, most likely aimed at liberals who already support a woman's right to abortion.

2. Pro Test

A pro-animal testing organisation who seek to promote the benefits of testing on animals for medical testing, Pro-Test also aim to dispel many of the myths surrounding the issue. This group intrigued me, partly because I have always taken as read that I am against testing on animals, and did find some of the justifications on the Pro-Test website arresting and actually quite reasonable... Secondly, it would definitely be a design challenge to try and persuade fence-sitters or animal lovers that animal testing is necessary and justified...However, I can't say I was completely convinced by Pro-Test's arguments (I did email them for clarification on some of their more ambiguous 'facts', but as yet have had no reply...) and wonder whether, for a project such a this, you should really be passionate about and believe in the issue you are bringing to public attention...

3. World Poverty

This is obviously a well-trodden path in terms of poster-design, and it is such a massive issue, ultimately I'm not sure I will decide to tackle it for the final design, but in researching current socio-political issues I kept coming back to the fact that, in the world today there is such a massive disparity between the privileged and the deprived, surely we as graphic communicators on the privileged side of the fence have a responsibility to use our craft to bring attention to this issue...? However, as I say I'm aware that this is not a particularly original issue, aside from being pretty huge, and in addition, perhaps there is a sense that telling people that world poverty is bad is a given and thus less of a design challenge? But then I guess the challenge would be cutting through all that background noise to make an impact...

Will see what Paul and Ela have to say tomorrow anyway!

"You, Me & the Naked Men" - Book Project continued...

Right - Having settled on a topic for my book, that is, how men and women respond to the nude male, I started experimenting with laying out the images and copy. I realised that as I had such a wide variety of images in terms of contrast, brightness, colour, etc, I needed to bring a degree of cohesion and consistency to the book, and so converted all the to greyscale, which was quite successful at drawing all the photos together visually.

Originally I started taking random extracts from the essay and laying them over images, but found without the driving force of the rest of essay, the book lacked progression and intention.

As a result I decided the book should actually be more like an illustrated form of the essay itself. This helped with the initial population of the InDesign template and the laying out of images and text, but after showing the work in progress to my group in the fourth session realised the layout of the book lacked imagination, dynamism and, most importantly, creativity.


After looking at the work of some of my peers I deduced that the more successful book designs were the ones which were visually varied and included spreads interspersed into the document which included quotes, facts, etc, ie, small accessible nuggets of info which gave the reader a route into the subject matter.

I used the session to start planning some more creative, unusual layouts to use in the book design, which would add variety and interest to the design:


I agreed with Steve that the design as it was, was very text-heavy, not particularly approachable, and that the design itself needed to be more fun, and so left the session wanting to explore/develop the following:

• Quotes about the naked male and the penis


• Visual euphemisms for the penis, such as bananas, cucumbers, etc.

• A distillation of the copy so the book as a whole continued to flow and progress, but more concisely, so it would be more accessible.


• More creative layouts – formatting type on angles, experimenting with colour, etc.


• Separation of provocative images from the analyses of various reactions, so readers are not distracted from the copy by the shocking content of the images, and so they are able to scrutinise their reaction to the naked male more clearly.

The more I worked on the design of the book, the more I realised the design needed to capture and express more completely what the book was all about, that is, primarily:

1. How we “read” images of the nude

Whilst experimenting with formatting text at angles to create interest, I realised that one simple way to capture the subject of how we “read” nudes was to set copy directly over images of the naked body, thus literally forcing the viewer to “read” the naked body:

2. How men and women construct their gender identities through viewing.
I experimented with typography and colour to convey the social constructs at play in reactions to nude images, playing with heavy, solid, “superhero” typefaces in blue for male voices and elegant calligraphic typefaces in pink for the female voices. Further, I decided to set the analyses of each comment at right angles to the quotes themselves, such that they could be read or skimmed over by the reader as desired:


While more visually interesting and intriguing, the range of typefaces compromised the consistency and cohesiveness of the book as a whole, and so ultimately I opted to convey the gendered voices solely through colour and male and female ‘toilet door’ symbols…

3. The lack of vocabulary/script to discuss the male nude.
One of the things that struck me as ironic whilst developing the book was that as a culture we have so many euphemisms for the penis and yet, as the essay illustrates, we have such difficulty discussing and the naked male form. As such, I made the decision to include an ‘A-Z’ of penis euphemisms running along the bottom margin of each spread throughout the whole book. Whilst this primarily served as a means of lightening the tone of the book, and adding a sense consistency throughout the design, it also partly served to highlight this contradiction between the plethora of words we have for ‘penis’ and our inability to vocalise our reaction to it…

Overall, I am really pleased with the final book, although in hindsight perhaps should have set aside more time to designing the book cover as I feel at present it is the least successful aspect of the design. Having said that, I think the visual puns (banana, cucumber, etc) and quotes used within the book are particularly successful at making the content approachable and engaging.


Having seen the book in printed form I've realised there are some elements which aren't quite in their optimum position on the page, for example some copy disappears into the gutter a little, and a couple of full-spread, full bleed images which lost their impact as again, some of the visual information disappeared into the gutter. As such, time permitting, I'm planning to tweak these aspects and have the book reprinted in time for the summative assessment, and also for use in my portfolio...

All in all, a really interesting and useful assignment.

[The whole book can be viewed online at http://issuu.com/maxwolf/docs/finalbookmw]