Moving on we decided to make a prototype web pages (all 15 pages) of each of the two dinosaur ideas and explore their colour pallets within our website layout. The first version implemented a more summer and female colour pallet using bright yellows and rose pinks; this was a problem as our target audience consisted of male and female children and the colour pallet was not catering for both genders.
Also this colour pallet incorporated only one of the two colours used in the original (yellow and red) logo, so with the second design we refocused our colour to incorporate both colours as well as some of the colours featured in the original site’s banner.
The second colour pallet incorporate the bright yellow and red from the original logo but also incorporated the blue and green colours that was seen in the banner and appealed more generally to children instead of being gender specific.
The second version also reincorporated the slogan used in the original site ‘Uncle Pete’s toys are magic’ but we shortened it to be ‘toys are magic’ to avoid repetition in the design.
Looking at these three designs we could tell that we all had very different approaches to the design and needed some assistance to effectively mesh these ideas together, the interim presentation was so crucial as the feedback gave us insights into what aspects to move forward on.
Jess (balloon design) explored a less conventional layout of designs, something that was unusual for this industry; and while classmates loved the look from a design perspective there were concerns about the practicality and usability of the design interface. The design didn’t adhere to the conventions of the competitors and thus it would take users more time to learn the site layout, which was a negative aspect, secondly the design lacked the integration of cataloguing or online shopping, which we sought to integrate.
Vanessa’s (top) design was more conventional and was excellent in the use of colours in the toolbar (tabs) to ‘code’ sections, which could help users distinguish areas something that we would incorporate further.
Concerns were that the use of rounded rectangles was too conventional and ‘childish’ for our sophisticated adult audience. While mine (bottom) lacked visually the finesse of the others my design was focused more on the organization of the information architecture and was seen as something we would use as the blueprint for our content layout.
While initially there were complications regarding ‘blending’ our ideas we soon sat down and mediated effectively to ensure we incorporate good aspects from each design instead of wanting our own individual designs to shine, we had to compromise and think of what is better for the group. This is a crucial lesson that I have learned as in the future I will have to learn to manage personalities in order to harness the best out of each individual in order to produce to best quality works.
How are women presented in the media? The hosts’ of ‘The Hamster Wheel’ show addressed this topic with their usual wit and banter which highlighted the levels of misogyuny still present today, putting into perspective how far we have come from the ‘burn the bra’ eras.
Apparently not very far as recent female intellectuals have expressed a rise in the occurrence of violent and sexual ‘trolling’ on the internet and especially on social media; the notion of having to be sexually appealing to be taken seriously as a thinker did not start with the internet and was present long before “Mary Wollstonecraft was called a hyena in petticoats” (Thorpe, 2011). Compliance trolling and the phenomena of anonymous digital misogyny is becoming an issue, to tackle this women banned together starting the twitter topic #mencallmethings which called for action as “awareness without action is worthless”, (Evans 2011) asking women to share their story and ‘name and shame’ their attackers.
According to Anita Kapoor however, we are currently living in a time she defines as ‘womanity’ where women generally have access to “education , power and freedom”, and express feminism in female misogyny , women against women. Kapoor goes on to state that in certain areas such as the beauty industry women show the inability to take accountabity and often play the victim when it comes to addressing beauty standards as, “we value power, perfection, obsession, competition but complain about the high beauty standards, but who is buying these products, not husbands for their wives, and who is writing these magazines, women”. On ‘The Young Turks’ Youtube channel the idea of women being sexist trolls is explored through the social media fight between Daily Mail columnist Liz Jones and superstar Rihanna, who prove that ladies can really hold their own in the realm of sexist trolling.
FIG 1
Jun, a former troll says that there are two reasons why a troll trolls , they either want attention or are bored and need something to stroke their ego, the reason why trolls are so affective Jun states is because of an old and outdated philosophy where humans “don’t want to stay silent, because we think silence means surrendering, and surrendering means losing” (2014). Instead he says users should apply to the 30 percent rule as you will always have 30 percent that will love you, 30 percent that will hate you and 30 percent that won’t care, so “file those trolls under the proper 30 percent and move on” (Jun , 2014). That all being said, I still encourage those efforts that ‘stick it to the man’.
Clicktivism has become a powerful tools for activism, its influence in raising awareness of issues on social media is uncanny, but are they really doing any good, is liking or sharing a page really doing anything productive? The 2014 survey conducted by Search Engine Journal found that 72% of all internet users are now active on social media, 18-29 year olds were the most active with 89% usage. (Ballas, 2014)
The study found that social media is where users turn to be informed about the current events and thus promotes a sense of community, a more desirable social style of civic participation. The signifying practice of ‘participatory politics’ Strauss says “has pull, a cultural capital, a current political currency capable of bringing them in through using a media a working class kids has access to” (2011, p.2). While most news stories suggest that young people are “utterly depoliticised, self absorbed and incapable of engaging in collective politics”(Strauss, 2011, p.1) Emily Hunter suggest otherwise, stating that the ‘doom generation’ is involved in volunteering more than 2.4 billion hours a year.
She does however note that Gen Y is not participating to the best of their capabilities seeing that ‘Gen Y is the largest generation on the earth, and those under 30 make up half of the earth’s population’; this generation now stands at a cross road, it can continue to use traditional activism methods or change the way the world or it can revolutionize the way youth interact with politics (Hunter 2013). Philip Shabecoff states that if “environmentalism is to be an agent of necessary social transformation, it will have to transform itself” (quoted in Hunter, 2013); and one movement who has successfully done this is the 350 movement, their focus, climate change through their effective ‘spreadability and drillibility’ (Jenkins, 2012, p. 3).
Their online campaigns, grassroots organizing, and mass public actions are coordinated by a global network active in over 188 countries; their mission is to “preserve a livable planet, scientists tell us we must reduce the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere from its current level of 400 parts per million to below 350 ppm which is the safe level”. Founded by a group of university friends in the US and global warming author Bill McKibben in 2008, a hot time for climate change debate, since then they have been hosting activities that linked activists and organizations around the world, including the International Day of Climate Action in 2009, the Global Work Party in 2010, Moving Planet in 2011, and Climate Impacts Day in 2012. The movement does it all , from fighting coal power plants in India , to stopping the Keystone XL pipeline in the U.S.
The main point people need to remember is that making a change is more than just liking a page or sharing it to your friends, social media can be a great tool to create awareness and create interest but if no action follows then the activism is only full of hot air.
Initially we focused more on recreating the logo as we were aware of the iconic brand and felt we had to create something that didn’t stray too far from its design, however this limited our creative capacity and after consultation with our teacher we found that we could reflect this iconic logo without completely copying its design, if it be through the use of similar colours or incorporating similar fonts.
We then approached the branding with a whole new realm of possibilities and explored the use of a character or animal as well as incorporating the original red and yellow into a colour pallet with other primary colours.
We explored the use of a bear but found it didn’t match the culture of the brand, then moved on to a dinosaur, which we thought expressed the heritage and long history the company had within Australia perfectly.
However the first dinosaur lacked the fun and excitement that we wanted to express, so in the final version we added a party hat and gave the mascot more detail, adding scales to its back, this in turn made the dinosaur look ‘ready to party’ and as well as expressing a more realistic rather than a cartoon look, as we wanted kids to believe this creature could be real.
Here is the progress of our design logos, from start to final.
Firstly we created a ‘competitive set’ which consisted of a database of competitors logos, and we found there were common features, the use of text based logo, text and icon (animal or toy) and the use of bright and multiple colours in logos were standard for competitors in this industry.
We chose the two most popular companies, ToysRus and Toyworld and did an analysis of their websites (explored in section 2) focusing on the elements of information architecture that were effective as well their stylistic elements. A web-based search for imagery and icons to represent the concepts of ‘heritage’ and ‘fun’ was carried out to help generate ideas for the visual stimulus for the branding identity.
Furthermore we had a primary source of information, which was the feedback from the interim presentation, which gave us a starting point to launch from and assisted us in tackle the major design decisions through helpful feedback from teachers and classmates.
We did research about the target audience and the industry in which we were going to be working in and even physically visited the store in Wollongong to get a sense of the atmosphere and culture of the company.
With all this information gathered we sat down and created our own brief based on the requirements of the assessment and the research we had conducted, forming our personalized brief (previous posts) and outcomes, which was a source we constantly returned to at each step of the design process.
Historically copyright and patent laws were created to promote creativity and encouraged innovation (fig 1), however once profit making was realised the intention became financially-orientated, intellectuals became protective of their work and exhibited “loss aversion” (Ferguson, 2014) which is represented in scene from finding nemo, a stigma was created where individuals were fine with remixing and copying unless it’s was their own work.
FIG 1
Remix breaks down the narcissistic indulgence, instead encouraging users to combine or edit existing materials to produce something new, a move towards a ‘caring is sharing society’ which “encourages the use of the old when creating the new” (Ferguson quoted in Blanda, 2014). In his documentary ‘Everything is a Remix’, Ferguson suggests that the basic element of creativity is to ‘copy, transform and combine’ (2014) thus everything is a remix; this engagement with content creation is the basis of Bruns’ ‘produsers’ which we discussed previously; as the audience now occupies a hybrid position (user + producer = produser) and actively engage in Bruns’ notion of a ‘distributed creativity ‘which he outlines it the” collaborative efforts to engage in creative, artistic masthups” (2010, p.4).
Remixing as Bruns suggest is an ongoing and never ending process of content development and redevelopment where audiences are continuously remixing and rewriting over what has come before (2010, p.7).Participants of remix culture has sought to highlight the inherent artistic and cultural value of works created in this process; with several produsage based networks such as Behance seeking to facilitate these artists’ contributions to innovation, through their hosting of remix events like the Adobe Logo Remix project (Fig 2).
FIG 2
Behance also facilitates a sustainable distribution network for digital content created through produsage and remixing such as the new update which made the integration of ‘Soundcloud’ files into the platform possible(Fig 3).
FIG 3
Remixing allows us to take a step back and re-examine our world through works that challenges preconceived notion about subjects ranging from politics, ethics and artistic freedom, these text debating these topics through a synthesis of existing material to create meaning through artistic expression. Taking advantage of the possibilities of remixing and understanding this new youth literacy is one which can enlighten and produce notions that will inspire change, and produce views of the world which are unknown. Remix, is it really stealing or art judge for yourself.
thewhiteafrican1994 