Smooth Criminals

BRIEF:

Find 5 examples of cultural appropriation used in a design context.

Cultural appropriation is defined as ‘the adoption or use of the elements of one culture by members of another culture.’ The practice is often criticised because elements of marginalised cultures are often not respected or celebrated in their own right – and only seems to find widespread acceptance when a ‘dominant’ culture steals it, repackages it and sells it. The examples you find could be adverts, products, campaigns or objects.

For each example you find, identify what may be the irresponsible nature of its cultural thievery.

A few suggested questions to ask are:

• How are they disrespectful of the culture they are ‘borrowing’ from?

• Is there any effort made to acknowledge the ‘stolen’ culture’s origins?

• Who is being affected by this example and why?

Produce as a series of five A3 portrait printouts using a consistent designed approach to lay out the images and text for each. APPROACH:

I wanted to find specific contemporary examples of cultural appropriation and more importantly, I wanted to find examples that had opinions from the people who’s culture has been appropriated from as I didn’t feel it was up to me to decide what is and isn’t appropriation. I wanted to design them with a combination of a poster and an editorial, so that they were hopefully eye catching but also had an article to read so the audience can get a good understanding of WHY it is appropriation and how it AFFECTS those whose culture is being appropriated.

News articles used in research

RESEARCH:

I spent a long time searching the internet for specific examples that had at least one news story written about it. Many of the examples had a couple of stories written about them and I would take reference and quotes from each, making sure there were specific names attached that I could use as quotes. I found many stories, especially in fashion, that had examples of cultural appropriation however I wanted a breadth of items to write about, plus I think that some of the examples were more in the realms of (in)direct racism, not necessarily appropriation.

RESEARCH:

For the design I looked at some contemporary poster designs, I liked the idea of using block colour for each poster. I also liked the halftone look when it came to showing images.

PROCESS:

Once I had each item researched and selected I started on the first poster, editing the image and working on the copy, I felt it was important to start with a quote so it gave context to the rest of the article, finally I gave the poster a title. I then used this as the template for each subsequent poster.

With each image I used the halftone / torn edges effect and made them monochrome. I did so to give a consistent look across each poster, to give me the option to colour the poster however I wished and also to combat the different resolutions of each image as some were not very large but the poster needed to be A3 format.

Once I had the image and text laid out I would work on the colour scheme for each poster.