Rationale

Our target audience for the Beach Cleanup campaign is children. We have used the notion that trash isn’t only consumed once, and will remain in the food chain, “You dump it… You eat it”. The poster uses pathos to appeal to the viewers, and make them feel grossed out and keen to make a difference. The Cleanup Claw is a way of making picking up rubbish fun and entertaining for the kids, while also ensuring better hygiene and safety. The website is our most informative piece, although the playfulness of the hovers and style allow it to still appear child-friendly and easy to navigate. Our stylistic approach appeals to children with the use of simple shapes, bright colours, and friendly characters, which allows us to make the event seem exciting and playful for those who attend. The narrative grows across the strategy, as shown in the User Experience list below.

Before
Poster- Used to advertise the event, and directs audience to website.

Website- Part of the website is dedicated to advertising the events, as well as having sections explaining why we are running this cleanup campaign.

During
Cleanup Claw- The claw is used during the event, as a way of making kids want to participate, making the event more enjoyable and fun, rather than disgusting.

After

Flyer- The flyer is handed out after participating in the event to say Thank You. It also has a link to our website in case the participants haven’t seen the poster prior.

Website- The website has sections dedicated to organising future clean-ups, as well as a list of clean-ups to attend in the future. Our flyers and posters can also be downloaded for future use at their own events, as well as ordering our cleanup claws.

Printing

Today I went in and got it all printed from Ink Digital. I got our poster printed in A2, our 'Clean Up Claw' poster printed in A3, and the two small flyers both double-sided printed in A4, so they fold up into the A7 size. 

Once picking them up from the printers, I was extremely happy with how they turned out, and definitely think they all came a long way in the final week. This project has been quite enjoyable to work on, especially in the sense that you need to make a suit of media which all relate and promote one particular event. 

Week Six, Session Two

Today was our final class of the semester, which was focused on solidifying our final production plans and get final small bits of feedback for printing. During today's class, we were trying to solve the dilemma of what type to use and where to place it. We opted for a hand-drawn font, which we then scanned in and created digitally.

Below, I have attached how our poster is looking as of the end of today's class. There is still a lot of aspects which needs developing, such as changing the background colour to a gradient, removing the opacity blurs of the rubbish, increase the type size, and also playing around with what rubbish is coming out of the fishes mouth and the scale of each piece.

As we come towards the final hand-in, I'm quite happy with how this has been developing. I know that once I make a few more changes to the poster that it will finally be at a point which I'm happy with. I will work on it later today and update the blog with the final poster. Over the next few days, I will also complete the two flyers (one with a male and one with a female), and then mock up the new website on Photoshop and InVision. I'm also looking to create a poster showing how 'Cleanup Claw' in context.

Week Six, Session One

Near the beginning of today's class we received some helpful feedback on each of our transmedia items from both Phoebe and Tristan, which meant that we had the rest of the class to work on these. We continued to work with the type on the poster, and how that is set out, as well as the overall composition and feel of the website. We felt that the website seemed a bit too mature for our target audience, rather than colourful like our latest flyer design. Tonight we are each going to continue working on these so that we can get some more feedback below. 

I have attached an image of how the new website is beginning to look.. It is still under development, and we are still yet to put in the proper text. I am quite happy with the new layout, although the title needs a bit more refinement still, particularly finding a way to fill the space either side of "Beach Cleanup". 

Overall I feel that we are on the right track, and everything is starting to come together now, as we continue to match up all of the aesthetics and themes across our transmedia projects.

Week Five Interim Presentation

The majority of today's class was based around an interim presentation, where we got into groups of 4 pairs and went around showing all of our work for feedback. We presented a few of our poster developments, as well as our flyer, grip claw (free-form idea) and our websites. We got some good, helpful feedback on each of these and feel like we are on the right track moving forward. Some feedback we got has been written below:

General:
- Brighten some of the colours, such as blues, and alter sand colour
- Have teeth consistent across all media

Posters:
- Try combining the two styles of the fish, one looks quite scary looking while the other look super friendly
- Play around with the text placement
- Experiment with possible background colours
- Try teeth similar to flyer, website mouths etc

Flyer:
- Play around with cover
- Add in Love Your Coast logo
- Less Text
- More kid-friendly
- For flyer poster, try having the boy holding our plastic grip claw and fist pumping the air, rather than hi-fiving the fish, as in the poster the person is eating the fish rather than being friends with it.

Website:
- Play around with placement of tabs and logos
- Make a whole mouth rather than just horizontal lines (curve edges of mouth)
- Possibly add social media icons

We also played around with putting the grip claw in context in some photos, to see how it would look when people interact with it. Here is an example:

By tomorrow we are hoping to have some more developments done, so that we can get some more feedback, as it's essentially our final class before the final week of developments and printing for hand-in. Jeremy is going to sketch a new drawing for the flyer poster, and I will render it digitally, in the same style as our current flyer poster. Jeremy is going to continue working on developing the poster, while I will work on the website.

Week Four, Session Two

For the most part of today, we spent working on and developing our ideas in studio time. We have been collaborating well, and have so far created a few concepts for all every piece of media, the poster, flyer, free-form object and also the website. We spoke to Tristan during the class, who seemed very happy with the progress we have made so far, and also gave his input into our ideas. He really like our idea to do our free-form object as a plastic grip claw for kids to pick up trash with, as this is a really effective way of getting kids to enjoy what they're doing.

Next Monday we will have our next interim presentation, one week before our final assignments are due. We feel we are on track, although will keep working consistently to make sure we stay on track to finishing comfortably on time, which will allow us time for final refinements and critiques. We will meet again at least once later on this week, and see how our work is developing, and spend a few hours working together on the project.

Week Four, Session One

To begin today's session, we started down in The Pit, and had a briefing of what papers we can choose for our core studio paper next year, and got some insight into some past examples of projects. This went on for about an hour or so.

Once we came up to the class, we had studio time until 11:30, and then we had a small class critique of a few posters. During the critique, our poster was one that got picked out for being very emotive and visually appealing. We got some good feedback from the class as well, on how to develop our posters. Tonight, we will continue to work on developing this poster so that we can get feedback on the refined version tomorrow.

Tonight I will also look to digitally create the poster to go on the back of our flyer. In order to do this, I have taken a photo of Jeremy's sketch from earlier today, and I will then use this as a guide on Photoshop. We are looking at having a flyer/brochure, each page A5 sized, which can also fold out into an A2 poster. I have included some drawings of how this works inside of my physical workbook.

Week Three, Session Two

A lot of today's class was spent as studio time, which also meant that we got some one on one time to spend with our teachers, and get their feedback on the direction we are heading with our concepts. Phoebe spoke to us about our concept, and agreed that the idea of eating trash when you consume marine life was quite an effective approach, particularly because it leaves the viewer feeling particularly grossed out, and has a strong wehi.

In the rest of the class, Jeremy and I continued to ideate and brainstorm ideas for our website, as well as our free-form idea, where we looked at the possibility of doing pens, laptop covers, or even phone cases/wallets. These options would help us to target a younger audience such as teenagers, especially considering a lot of them live on their phones and laptops. 

At the end of the class we went down to the pit for a brief introduction to InVision, where Tim was showing us what you can do using this prototyping concept. I have used InVision before in semester one, although it was for designing a phone app. It was interesting to see some features you can add in for web designs such as the hover feature, and also making the page longer so you can scroll down it.

Over the course of the next week we will continue to develop our poster, as well as come up with some concepts for our web layout. We will look to meet again before Monday so that we can see what each other has done and continue to develop from there.

Week Three, Session One

For today's interim presentation, we shared all of our poster concepts in small groups of about 6 people (3 teams), and got some critical feedback on each of our concepts, and how we could develop them. Some of the feedback was quite helpful, and it was interesting to see just how an audience reacts to our concepts (Wehi). We found which ones the majority found most successful, or which ones had the most potential, and spent our studio time working on developing and looking at these. 

The final hour of class was spent at a lecture down in The Pit, where we were told all about the Transmedia side of the brief. I'm actually really looking forward to designing the website and using inVision, as I have experience from this sort of thing from my elective in Semester One where we had to use inVision and design an app for a phone, or a website. I also quite enjoy the wire frame prototyping process, and looking at user interaction which certain sites and apps. I feel that inVision is a good program to use for this as it allows rapid prototyping of concepts, where you can mock up wire frame layouts on paper, scan it into inVision and then analyse the user interaction from there.

By tomorrow, our group is required to produce wire frame sketches for at least three existing websites. We were shown two in class that we have to do, and then Jeremy and I will do another free-choice website as an extra, so we will have four sketched up to look at.

Week Two, Session Two

We began with a lecture in the pit today, with Matt and Lee talking a lot about moodboards and coming up with different stylistic approaches to concepts in order to change their meaning and symbolism. At the end of the lecture, we watched a 15 minute video, the All Blacks supporters song called "Team Ball Player Thing" which has been created to raise money in order to help fund the research for finding a cure for Battens disease. The video was extremely entertaining and funny, and it was interesting to see how the clients (the kids) were the main source of creativity in the video, using their ideas to generate the song.

At the beginning of today's class we all put our moodboards and concepts so far out onto a table, for the whole class to walk around and place little post-it notes with feedback onto other student's work so they could find out what needed developing or what was working well. Jeremy and I received good feedback on our work, and also some helpful ideas for development.

For the majority of the class, we worked in our groups on developing our concepts. Jeremy and I continued trying out different compositions, styles, and various ways of interpreting our concepts, and came up with quite a few effective designs. I created four various concepts which are different ways of showing my concept of "Trash isn't only consumed once..." and these can be seen in my physical workbook.

On Monday we have our first interim presentation, where we have been asked to produce a minimum of 2 digital posters, printed out for the presentation. I am aiming to digitally create at least two or three on my own, while Jeremy is also going to try and create two posters as well, that way we will have a large range of ideas which can be critiqued in-depth at the interim, and will be more helpful in the long-run, making sure we have the most effective design chosen, rather than 'becoming attached' to a certain idea as mentioned in today's lecture. Jeremy and I will meet up again on Friday to see how each others digital posters are coming along, and discuss where we are planning on going next with our ideas, in the lead up to the first interim presentation.

Week Two, Session One

Today's class consisted of presenting our independent research and concepts in smaller groups, and receiving critique on our ideas. We started off by showing our moodboards, and then the 6 concepts that Jeremy and I had come up with over the past week. We got some good feedback on each of these, and the other students gave their opinion on which ones they liked the most, or thought had the most potential for development.

Following this, we did some brainstorming as a class (split into two bigger groups based on the chosen topic) and came up with a lot more in-depth ideas. Once we came back together as a class, we had 10 minutes to come up with 10 ideas, as a means of rapid ideation. However, most of the class only managed to get around 6. I managed 6 in that time, mainly because I had already done 3 pages of rapid ideation over the last week, already generating over 36 thumbnail sketches of my initial ideas. We then chose the best ideas between our group, refined them ourselves, and then another group got to choose our best idea and have a go at refining it themselves.

Towards the end of the class we presented our best ideas in front of the class. The class quite liked the idea I had drawn up of the human eating a fish, eating another fish, eating trash. They thought it was really effective in terms of it's symbolism, and they thought the tagline was very fitting "Trash isn't only consumed once".

Week One, Session Two

At the beginning of class we started off by sharing our homework, which was to design two posters, for two reasonably different characters. I chose Ned Flanders and Bart Simpson, as they are quite contrasting characters. These posters can be seen in my physical workbook.

The class consisted of brainstorming about our topic, in which we had chosen to go with the Clean the Beach topic. Following these group brainstorms, we began to work on our project plans, as well as doing some rapid ideation for initial poster concepts. At 11:30am we went down to the pit to have a look at moodboards and team contracts.

By next week, we need to have 5 initial poster concepts drawn up, moodboards completed, and some research on existing visual precedents. Jeremy and I will meet up again on Friday to see how each other's research and ideation is going, and to continue to work on our ideas together.

Introduction to Koha

Today we were introduced to the new brief, which is dealing with the aspect of Koha, following on from Ihi Wehi. The brief sounds very exciting, despite most people feeling overwhelmed initially because of the amount of tasks required to complete. The project consists of working in pairs, and creating a poster, flyer and a free-choice (video, t-shirt, etc.) which will all then be included in a website. So the brief essentially consists of designing four things, all within the 6 week period.

In the class itself, we were divided into some smaller groups to begin doing a Simpsons exercise, where we get given a character and need to design a poster which would persuade them to come to an event, either a Beach Clean Up Day, or a Meet The Neighbours Day. We were given Marge, and created two A4 posters.

The two above posters are the ones our group came up with. The top poster was focusing on how meeting the neighbours will will bring more support, hence the image of Maggie crying and hands coming from one side. The lower image was showing how meeting neighbours offers support in a way that you can then share your problems and get help, as Marge has an underlying gambling problem.

By tomorrow, we have been asked to focus on two more characters and create a poster for each. We also chose our partners today, and I am with Jeremy Hall.