Communication design Week
Brief: to create a morse code poster, which depicts the information given on your task card. Mine was "George Floyd was murdered by a white police officer"
The messages were both celebratory and memorial. These posters were for this purpose. there of influencing some of my creative decisions.
There were also not supposed to be illustrations within the poster.
Drawing of Floyd to start the project, because his image is important, more importantly than the no illustration rule is less important than this event.
The process:
The first step of deigning this was to research the event that I was given: this was a fairly recent piece of black history, so it was not particularly difficult to research, as the Black Lives Matter protests were something I saw first hand, and the news paid a lot of attention to this event. It was an arrest which led to death for George Floyd, particularly shocking as it was police officer who murdered him.
The second step was to think about the code: This task required a code, here were some options for the code:
1. Atbash is the alphabet backwards e.g ABC=ZYX
2. Aiz26 is that each letter correlates with as number 26 no. = 26 numbers e.g, A=1 B=2 etc.
3. Caesar cipher jumbles the alphabet up by pushing back letters e.g., ABCDEF= XYZABC
4. Pigpen is a grid system of creating symbols as code for letters.
I chose the pigpen code, this is because I felt it was the one that I could efficiently translate, given the time pressure, that was the most accessible. Furthermore, it had the word pig in it, for I'm sure other reasons, however given the strong political message this particular black history event holds, I felt it fitting to correlate it. Police are often called "pigs" and this was definitely one of the times that that opinion was radially displayed. so it felt like a fitting code.
The design of the poster included the colours green, black and red, as those are th colours of the Pan African flags s well as the black lives matter symbol, because reducing Floyds death to mere linear symbols felt less personal, and to show respect to him and those affected by police brutality, it needed to be displayed as a symbol of importance of the event and the BLM protests around it. I cannot stress enough that this poster had to maintain a large level of respect, so the colours and design were considered as not a fun taks, but more a memorial task, that aimed to document, not deduct.
the third was to make some English and some in code.
The poster was then drawn out and painted, I did a layer of green, red for the letters, as it stands out quite a lot, getting the the memorial intentions of the posters and the black for the BLM sign and the code, as the English text was more important and needed to be in the forefront.
The code: PIGPEN
Translations of the passage " George Floyd was murdered by a white police officer" and the BLM symbol.
Experimenting with colour : green and red, I like this one.
Looking at the layout and how the colours work together. I prefer the first colour way, so I continued with that one.
Outcome:
This was the final outcome, I wasn't particularly pleased with it, however it did fulfil its purpose, very well. The text could have been neater, although the code came out well as I used a piece of card to make the edges straight and a Posca pen to finish them up. Overall, this task is not something I would partake in again, as it was not very successful from neither a graphics standpoint, or a creative one.
The poster!
