GDF Project: Taking Culture to the Blokes

So, unfortunately I wasn’t too successful at blogging about the GDF project as I went along (something I intend to rectify this term..!), and as my development pdf for the formative assessment is quite a comprehensive summary of my process (you can see it here), what follows is an abridged summary of how my project developed from brief to formative assessment…Even so, it's still pretty detailed, so apologies!

Brief:
Client: Charity
Message: “Appreciate Culture”
Target Audience: 30-50 year old Working Class Men

1. Initial Research & Ideas
Examined ways blokes are communicated to:


Tabloids:

• The headlines are short, punchy and often utilise puns or wordplay.
• Common topics - sport, war and women.
• Headlines are sharp sensationalist statements and use a solid, heavy typographic style.

Initial ideas:
A series of posters which juxtapose text or image from ‘high culture’ with text or image from ‘low culture.

2. Research into Charities and Culture
Explored how to reconcile client (‘charity’) and message (‘appreciate culture’), so researched charities:

• Core characteristic of charities is public benefit.
• ‘Cultural charities’ focus on promotion of various forms of art, the preservation of traditions, or the appreciation of local or national history.

Possible clients:

• St Brides
• Arts Council England
• Working Class Movement Library

Concept challenge - take art & culture out of the elitist institutions, perhaps in the form of a beer festival/pub crawl for culture…

3. Finalising & Formalising the Brief
As the core characteristic of charities is public benefit, the Arts Council are organising an arts festival to promote culture to an under-engaged demographic:

Final Brief:
“Arts Council England are organising a beer & CULTURE festival aimed at 30-50 year old working class men. They need an identity which not only engages this target audience and communi¬cates with them on their own
terms, but which also captures this sense of ‘culture’ which lies at core of the festival.”

4. Observing Blokes: Initial Research & Ideas

Research: Went to greasy spoon and observed:

• The ways in which working class men interact
• Blokes had clear distrust of theory/academia
• Groups and categories of blokes, eg, uniforms; Site workers – Hi-vis jackets, Indoor labourers - polo shirts, Painters & decorators – paint spattered
  

Perhaps these groups could inform possible backgrounds for the logo, eg, a hi-vis fluorescent yellow, a paint-spattered brown, a black bootprint, etc.


Looked at initial applications of identity, eg on beer mats, posters, etc -need a logo that would be clear and effective on both large and small scales...

5. Working Class Logos: Beer, Football & Heraldry
Examined logos my target audience come into contact with on a daily basis, including football badges and beer logos.


Common motifs/themes:

• Heritage and tradition
• Heraldry
• Colours: blue, red, yellow, black, white.
• Working class roots
• Lion important icon of working class culture, eg, Three Lions, Carling, Royal Crest, etc.

6. Dissecting the Anatomy of Heraldry

Traced the various constituent parts of the logos and scrutinized the popular emblems used in the logos, for example, crowns, castles, birds, trees and of course, lions.


7. Idea Generation & concept development
Made a series of collages from the constituent parts of logos which bought together the sense of heritage & tradition with the arts & culture.


Explored how the forms and shapes could interact.

First steps in digitising the concept were to create vectors of components, but realised logo had lost roughness and handmade quality - anything too glossy and refined would not engage the target audience.


Tried vectorising some of the tracings – brought back roughness.

8. Concept Development: Typefaces
Looked at three types of typeface:

• Blackletter style typefaces – heritage and tradition, but fussy
• Simpler, cleaner fonts – legible but dull
• Solid heavy typefaces – emulate tabloid headlines

Final typeface decisions:

• Rosewood (FILL) for the main festival title - creates overall impression of heritage and tradition. Quite a solid, heavy typeface, consistent with the loud, solid tabloid headlines.
• Little Caesar for the ‘mottos’ - does not compete for attention with main title.
• Lithos Pro for the ‘inscriptions’ - clean, classic look.

9. Concept Development: The Rough with the Smooth

• Realised the design would need to be a balance between hand-drawn roughness, and clean lines and shapes - reintroduced the regular concentric roundel almost as a washing line that all the other rough and raw elements could hang off.

• Tried to capture the anarchic energy at play in the collages – returned to original paper collages and decided digital version needed to be more symmetrical

• Wanted to reference football more obviously - added stripes and quadrant layout to the central shield

• Needed to create a simpler version of the logo that would read well when scaled down

10. The Palette of Football
To consider the identity’s palette, examined the colours and patterns of football shirts.


Most common colours used black, blue, red, yellow and white.

11. Experimenting with Colour
Tried applying football colours to logo:

Settled on black and yellow colour scheme: draws on the yellow of the hi-vis jackets, and safety notices on building sites.

12. Final Festival Identity for Formative Assessment


13. Ideas and Tasks to Take Forward

• Relatively happy with logo, but still not quite perfect in terms of engaging with audience - needs further development
  
• Explore more fully different types of yellow
• Create mock-ups of applications of logo, eg, beer mats, tea mugs, etc.
• Include more colour and typography development work in pdf
• Explore and include other permutations of logo
• Populate pdf with captions

So there you go! All in all, I was really pleased with what I submitted for the formative deadline - I haven't studied design formally since GCSE (9 years ago..!) so was a little apprehensive about how I'd fare in my first assessed project for a while, but I found the course well structured and the tutors really supportive, which definitely helped...! My feedback from the formative assessment was really positive, but obviously I still have a few things I want to develop before the summative assessment in a few weeks...A good start though!

Looking forward to what Term 2 has in store!