Collection 100

Research proposal.

The subject matter of this new brief is..

Ian Curtis

Possible categories and interrelationships I can look at will be...

Music,media,Parenthood,suicide,the music industry,

Research Processes will include..

Primary methods - Interviews with people on opinion about his music

Do they know who he is

Do they know about his life not just his music.

Possibly photography (He's dead so its going to be abit tricky)

Secondary methods - His music and lyrics and pre recorded interviews.

Who and where will I research?

Primary methods.

Leeds/manchester/birmingham public - People who would've been a teenager in the late 70's

and friends

Secondry methods

Lyrics,books,blogs,music forums

Research processes will include...

Photography of his house in 77 Barton Street, Macclesfield, Manchester to get a sense of his surroundings and what he

was faced with everyday he walked out the front door.

Interviews with people of leeds and birmingham and manchester,where Ian was from

to get some knowledge out of people.See how much they know about this almost forgotten legend.

See if his name still lives on though music influences and have people had the same life experince as Ian or Debrah (His wife)

Music recordings from live shows back in late 70's/early 80's

Documentary footage

book about his life.

Visual Language - Lights

Moving on from the last session where we photographed lightswitches.
I thought it would be interesting to literally move on and go on to photograph light/light sources.
This followed the rule from last session which was to photograph a single light source.
Thought this would be an interesting logic because things such as lights have single lightswitches.
eg.we turn on our whole kitchen using one lightswitch which powers one light.
So I went outside the college building (This was a rule) and went round hunting down light sources.
In this festive time of year it was surprisingly difficult finding a single lightsource because there's loads of christmas lights about the city.
These are the ones I think worked particularly well







I think these worked well because they were lightning something up in the background but they were lighting them subtlety.
So I loved these because it showed the function of lights.

Visual Language-Light switches

I worked with Gemma Byrne for this session and we was given a object to photograph.But we had to choose some rules
when photographing them.
Our rules were.

Only photograph switches with one switch and one switch alone.
The light switches had to be turned on.
and the switch had to be in the middle of the photo.
This made them more hard to hunt down and they always in sneaky corners.
It became an obsession
and we was not going to drift away from our rules.
As a result of this
we never got the full amount of photos we had to take.
But here are the ones we did manage to find.

They are not visually appealing and are really boring to look at but what I loved about this breif was the logic behind it
more than the visual. Although I do think they work as a sequence purely because of reputation

OUGD102- What If

"What if a group of graphic design students get together, and decide to solve a problem?
Based on your common interests, research and knowledge, you must establish a “problem” that affects some sector of the general public in Leeds.
You must develop logical, original and adventurous research lines of enquiry in order to justify the relevance of the “problem “ which should inform a range of solutions.
The solution(s) must be resolved, designed and presented in the public domain and recorded appropriately."

This is the first brief in the module.
We were put into groups and chose a problem we could solve.
it had to be for the leeds public
my group consists of Josh,Brady,Kim,Dutch and myself and our problem was originally drugs at leeds festival.
We put together a questionnaire to ask people who had been to leeds fest how comfortable they felt with people doing drugs in the festival and how it should be policed.It was then brought to our attention that people travel from all over the UK to attend the leeds festival, therefore it was not focusing on the residents of leeds.

So we went back and looked at the club scene in leeds and how easy it is to use drugs in the clubs.For primary research two of our teamates went to a nightclub to observe the drug scene for primary research. Whilst at the club they noticed a very high usage of a drug named "Mcat".They saw a few people taking the drug and began asking them questions as the users's "experience" grew.My job was to find out as much secondary research as I could about the newly popular drug.

"A stimulant drug with effects similar to MDMA producing euphoria, alertness, talkativeness and feelings of empathy. It can also cause anxiety and paranoid states and risk overstimulating the heart and nervous system to cause fits. Severe nosebleeds have been reported after snorting."Upon research I found out that the drug is only 2 years old and is being sold as plant food.It's what is known as a legal high. People take it as a drug because its legal and know that if they are caught doing it the law is powerless and it has the same effect as an illegal drug. They also think that just because it has a legal label slapped on it people are thinking it is safe.

Because it's such a new drug it was very difficult to find some hard evidence so we could only go on what we know.We found out that it hasn't even been researched which is why its not illegal.

So we decided that our new problem was;

We we all given jobs to come up with how we were going to do this and research jobs to do along with incase we found something new about the drug as we went along.
Because not even scientists know alot about this drug we cannot say "Don't take this drug because "x" and "x" will happen to you" and the people taking them are not going to stop taking them.
So we thought we could highlight the fact that now one knows anything about it.
We all went away and came up with how we would publicize this problem.
This is my design process

I chose the image of the guinea pig because people don't know what is in the drug so everytime they take it they are being "lab test guinea pigs"

"Are you a guinea pig?"
I think it's good to ask questions when trying to inform/persuade because it puts the reader at a awkward/uncomfortable position and depending on how striking that question is,it could be a question that bugs them and makes them want to find out more.


In this design i have chosen to cut up the circle around the guinea pig because the problem with Mcat is a broken matter.
It has the same effects as MDMA but is legal.
I have also chose to emphasize "Are You" by making it black and the rest of the question white.
As well as working with the black and white image of the guinea pig,the black type emphasizes the point and makes the question more personal.

I've included a second circle for the animals fur.
I love circles as its simplicity at its best.
simple shapes and easy.
I love the way the two colours have bled into eachother in the middle.
Is a piece of design that "writes itself"




Mcat is being sold as a plant feeder and it even says on the packaging that it's not for human consuption.Drugs in general effect the brain so I thought it'll be good to show that it's for plants not humans by making roots come out of a human brain.
Of course this won't really happen and it is slightly unrealistic but I think it gets the message across
Here is one of my mac visuals: