Gender and Design Research by Rachel Irwin

Stratagies for Visual Research

Rachel Irwin

Design Problem

This project has been spilt into 4 pathways, Pictograms and Infographics, Visual Research Workshop, Crafting and Tradtional Mediums of Womenâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Design and Visual Tools to Seperate Design by Gender. All of these pathways were explored simultaneously throughout this project and interlink and overlap on another in areas. As the ITC report to go alongside this project was about the role of women in graphic design, I felt like this project needed to reflect issues along the lines of gender, stereotypes and womenâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s design. But I also wanted to explore how to collect visual research of my own through a workshop and interpret results into visual information graphics. Therefore I have ended up with a large body of research, experiments and analysis, along with some more finalized pieces.

Initial Concept

Card sorting

Research | Research Methods

Surveys and Questionnaires How: Get 1st, 2rd and 3rd year students to answer questions about their knowledge and awareness of graphic designers, both male and female and see if there is an inconsistency. Progress: Emailed questionnaire questions to Catherine, and waiting for her input before sending it to all students on FdA and BA course.

Conceptual Landscape How: Drawing diagrams, sketches and maps of social phenomena.

Interviews How: Record interviews that I conduct with people who have knowledge of women and graphic design. Progress: I have interviewed Teal Trigg and Sian Cook, who both founded the WD+RU, and I am going to be interviewing Sheila DeBrettville.

Five Whys? How: Ask “why” questions in response to five consecutive answers.

Card Sort How: ask people to arrange cards spatially, in way that makes sense to them and look at how this indicates priorities and groupings. Progress: Got students to lay out cards and see what topics they connect in their minds. Cross-cultural comparison How: Using personal and published accounts to reveal differences between attitudes in one or more countries. Progress: I am going to be sending questions to Sheila DeBrettville, who is the Professor of Design at Yale in America, and hope to get some kind of perspective of how the problem differs between the US and UK. Secondary Research How: Looking at published articles and journals on women and graphic design. Progress: I collected an extensive body of magazine, journal and web based resources, which have proved key information for my report.

Word – Concept Association How: Ask people to associate descriptive words with different areas of design in order to see if they relate them to men or women more.

Personal Inventory How: Get people to document things that are important to them, to reveal what their values and perceptions are. Historical Analysis How: compare features of the industry through various stages of development. Long Range Forecasts How: Write up prose scenarios that describe how the future of graphic design could look. Behavioural Mapping How: Track the positions and movements of people within a space over time. Social Network Mapping How: Notice different kinds of social relationships and their interactions Collage How: creatng images and moods using found imagery to show themes and ideas.

Research | Infographics

Information graphics are visual representations of information, data or knowledge. They often use simplified representations, along with colour coding and size to communicate information, & help make data understandable at a glance.

Research | Mega Information Graphics

Mega information graphics are large scale visuals that convey huge amounts of data within one peice. There are often so detailed that you have to get very close to the peice to see what the image is made up of. They can be busy and intricate whilst displaying one massive statistic, that would be diffcult to imagine.

Chris Harrison uses computer science, art and engineering to help create large scale visualizations. This image show 16,276 names of colours all on one image. From a distance these just look like tiny flecks, but are in fact thousands of words.

Artist Chris Jordan creates supersized images picture some almost unimaginable statistics. This image shows the plastic cup useage. He works with large formats and photography to create these images that from a distant just look like an interesting image, and only when you get coser to the image do you see that it is created from hundreds of thousands of the same object repeated.

Research | Pictograms

Pictograms are graphical simple images the represent a physical object, they are often used in diagrams, instructions and public places. The collection on these pages are examples of the way men and women are represented through pictograms. As this project is based around the theme of gender I thought it would be interesting collect the different ways we distinguish between something being male and female,

Research | Pictograms | Toilet Signs

These images are a few examples of pictograms in one of their most common forms - toilet signs. Although many sign are very conventional, these examples show some of the more creative ones. Some use very basic concepts like a triangle, whilst others rely on colour as well as shapes. Many give women a skirt or dress, whilst the male sign will be standing with his legs slightly apart as if he is wearing trousers. Even in todayâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s time when a lot of women wear trousers, we still associated the image of a skirt on a pictogram person with a woman.

A standard basic toilet sign

Research|Symbols and feminism

As the report that co insides with the research book is about the role of women in society and the graphic design industry, I have research imagery associated with womenâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s right movements over the past 100 years, to see if I can draw out ant themes that could be useful in this project.

Research | Suffragettes to She-Devils

These are images from the book Suffragettes to She - Devils, which contains the history and imagery used in womenâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s liberation movements and seeing if the imagery, stlye or lanuage could be appropiated within my designs to get the message across. A reoccuring symbol is of the planet and Roman goddess Venus, which is used to indicate the female sex. There seems to be a strong use of bold typography in some of this work and is espeically obvious in the cover of the book, with bright colours, along with large bold font.

3. Please list your favourite graphic designers, if you have any. List as many as you like. 1. dont have one 2. Michael Perry, Josef, Muller Brockmann 3. David Carson 4. Alan Kitching, El Lizzisky, swiss design style 5. They are a lot. Some of them are: Andy Worhole, Barbara Kruger, Tim Mars, Gustav Klutsis, Barbara Oâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;Keef, Brothers Stemberg, Andy Goldsworthy, Pablo Picasso, Jan Tschichold, Michael Worthington, Paula Sher, and a lot more. 6.Apeloig, non-format (studio), Ed Fella, Angela Lorenz, Karel martens, Joseph Albers, wimcrouwell, mike perry, loveworn (studio), ill studio (studio), etc 7. Stefan Sagmeister 8. kenyahara 9. Philippe Starck, Alan Fletcher, Bruno Munari, Paul Klee, Michael Peters, Anna Hill, Gabi Bolton, Zoe Murphy 11. Giambattista Bodoni, David Carson, Milton Glaser, Glenn Jones Marian Bantjes 12. Daniel Eatock, Paul Rand, Alvin Lustig, Stefan Sagmeister 4. Please list the male graphic designers you are aware of, list as many as you can. 1. dont have one 2. ALAN FLETCHER, MICHAEL PERRY, DAVID CARSON, ED FELLA , JOSEF MULLER BROCKMANN , RODCHENKO, JAN TSCHICHOLD, A.BRODOVITCH,PAUL RAND, SAUL BASS,,MAX BILL BRUNO MUNARI, , HENRYK TOMASZEWSKI 3. David Carson, Paul Rand, Daniel Eatock

Neville Brody 4. Daniel Eattock, Alan Kitching, El Lizzisky.... 5. Tim Mars, Gustav Klutsis, Andy Goldsworthy, Brothers Stenberg, Jan Tschichold, etc... 6. I can think about many 7. S.S 8. Alan Fletcher, Sagmeister, Neville Brody 9. Michael Peters, Alan Fletcher, Philippe Starck, Bruno Munari, Paul Klee 10. The one who bit his own ear off... you know the one. 11. David Carson, Milton Glaser, Glenn Jones 12. Too many

5. Please list the female graphic designers you are aware of, list as many as you can. 1. dont have one 2. BARBARA KRUGER 3. none 4. Honestly i cant think off the top of my head with out using google (which i assume would be cheating)

Research | Collecting own research

This questionnaire was created to gain results into understanding if graphic design students felt there were women role models within the industry and at design talks. Also to see if certain areas of the graphic design industry are perceived as masculine or feminine career paths.

Expiermentation | Typography as Image

Using interview text and quotes for ITC report to create type as image peices of design. Created using InDesign and Wordle.

80% of purchasing decisions are made by women and yet 83% of creatives are men.

Examples of creating visual type expierments using research from ITC report.

Experimentation | Type and Symbols

Collecting visual research, these are images of a the Index of the book The Thames & Hudson Dictionary of Graphic Design and Designer. I photocopied the index pages and went through and higlighted all the male designers with blue and all the female designers with pink. Overall there were only 25 women designers out of a total of 357 mentioned in the book. Straightaway you can see a major difference just by looking and the amount of each colour.

Expierimenting with creating some kind of scale using the male and female symbols. This image over was my starting point that then developed onto the images on the next page. The results above were from my survey and where I was getting my information and data from.

Experimentation | Survey Interpretation

These pages are about interpreting my survey results into some kind of infographics, and documents the development of this idea.

Highly Male Orientated

Equal

Highly Female Orientated

I developed this scale based on the male and female symbols, which increasely shows more of each symbol.

The higher the number of responses the darker the colour would be.

Next each area of graphic design was assigned a colour and the stronger the colour the more each response was said. This image on the left shows the results of survey, It shows that all the areas of grpahic design are perceieved to be either gender netural or masculine.

Branding Promotion Typography Book Magazine Web Interactive Advertising Illustration Animation

Experimentation | Survey Infographics

Next I tried playing around with the visuals by overlapping them, whilst you canâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t really understand the data, it still creates a visually dynamic experiment.

These were more playful expierments of what I could do using pictograms.

Expiermentation | Creating Pictograms

These pictograms were created to go alongside my proposal and my report, they were to compliment the text and visualise the differences being mentioned. Each image was created to compliment a particular point made within the proposal or report.

‘If you flick through the design history books, you’ll notice that pretty much all the “great designers” have something in common. They’re men.’ Alice Rawsthorn

‘Women in full-time work in the UK are paid, on average, 17.2 per cent less than men.’ Times Online

‘What happens to the women when they graduate? Because the percentage of female students to male is much higher, so there is that whole issue where do they go?’ Teal Triggs

‘Why do you — all three of you — suppose there are so few female graphic designers — or at least so few female ‘superstar’ graphic designers? Is there a glass ceiling in graphic design?’ Question to Milton Glaser

Experimentation | Playing with Pictograms

‘Why don’t female creatives rise to the top? They get fed up with the dickheads, the heartbreaking choices, the insane juggling that makes you get up and vomit every morning from the stress ... until, finally, they say to hell with it.’ Carole Cadwalladr

‘Change doesn’t come in one great thump. It comes one by one, and it looks kind of funny and then it doesn’t.’ Paula Scher

Idea 3 £30,000 in £50 notes, 6,600 £50 notes on one page.50 in a row with 132 rows on an A1 peice of paper, notes are scaled down.

Experimentation | Mega Information Graphics “Women who work full time are cheated out of around £330,000 over the course of their lifetime” Margaret Prosser

Ideal 1 £330,000 pound coins laid on top of one another = 6.5miles

Ideal 2 £330,000 pound coins all on one page, managed to get about 6,000 coins on a page and then my computer froze.

Q1: What makes you feel each of the emotions? Q2: How do you feel these emotions in your body? Draw anything you wish. Q3: Where do you feel these emotions in your body? Draw one spot only Q4: What colours do you associate with these emotions 5: Do your emotions have direction? If yes, draw arrows. The emotions being asked about were Anger, Joy, Sadness, Fear and Love Answers from question 4

Answers from question 2

Research | Emotionally Vague Graphics

This images are from a project called Emotionally Vague, which has created a visual languages of feelings by using colours, lines and word frequencies. This project involved getting the participants to get involved in creating the visuals by drawing responses. These were then collated, and with the colours and words associated the most frequent responses are the most shown or at the top of the page. With the drawing responses the answers were overlapped and the darker areas show places where people most associate each feeling.

Answers for Love

This work has inspired me to do some kind of workshop with students on the FdA to create visual data. Ideas for a workshop so far: To get students to draw a man and and women see if there are certain things that people draw to idenitify someone as being male or female. From this you could find the average shape of a man or woman. Give people an ambiguous figure shape to add detial to to make male or female. Get them to pick colours they associate with each gender. Pick their favourite colours to see if they choose colors that are deemed gender specific. get them to group words see if certain words are gender related. Do word association games

Research | Gender Stereotypes

These spreads are from a book on Issuu which is about stereotypes. It has been created by a graphic designer who was interested in visualising everyday gender stereotypes. The book documents the results of a survey conducted on school children on their views on gender stereotypes of colours, shapes and

activities. This project is interesting as it documents and show the results in a graphical and easy to understand way, and could be a useful reference for when I am interpreting my results.

Research | Gender of a Designer

One area of interest is whether you can tell if a piece of design has been designed by a man or a woman. This will be another area I look into with my workshop, I am going to show the students examples of design work by recent graduates and want them to guess weather they think the people who designed it is a man or a woman. Often the subject matter that the piece is about will be the main influence over the gender that you associate with an image, but maybe women designers tend to work on certain projects more than men, and this in turn makes the design look more feminine.

These images are some of the examples from the UAL Showtime website that I have found to show to the students.

“Generally speaking, unless fairly obvious clues are presents it is extremely difficult, if not impossible, to take any given design (graphic or product) and determine whether its creator was a man or a woman. The gender of the designer is rarely an issue in design criticism. Visual qualities don’t fall into a male or female bracket either. Making such distinctions in terms of end product is to my mind very difficult grounds, Where differences and distinctions can emerge is in the nature of the design process itself – for example, in establishing a design approach, interpreting the needs or requirements of the end users, assigning priorities with regards to function or appearance, and in the activity of decision-making or negotiating teamwork. Women apply a different psychological framework and life experiences (ie. viewpoint) to design decision- making. This should be welcomed and recognised as a positive contribution in determining the nature of a product or message conveyed – it should not be reduced to superficial issues such as men like hard edges and women prefer curves.” Liz MCQuiston

Images of the materials we had for the students to use during the workshop

Collecting | Workshop Plan

I conducted a workshop with the first year students on the FdA Design for Graphic Communication course at LCC. From these tasks I wanted to find out if there was any themes I could find where the men and women did thinks differently and also to explore how we visualise gender stereotypes.

Lesson Plan 1. Blank person -15 mins Give students worksheet with blank outlines of a person, maybe just the head and get them to draw the rest of the person to make it into a man and a women. Make it a man 30 second 1 min 5 mins Make it a woman 30 second 1 min 5 mins Materials: Worksheets 6 per person, and drawing materials. 2. Colours – 15 mins Method: Give them all squares of colours and get them to arrange and stick them to a worksheet. 1. Arrange in your favourite to least favourite on a scale or in piles 2. Arrange them in piles of what masculine, feminine and gender neutral Materials: Worksheets, coloured squares, glue 3.a Image Association – 10 mins 3.b Shape Associations – 10 mins Spilt the group in half, and have one doing 4a

while the other is doing 4b then swap so it isn’t too crowded while they are doing it. Method: Give everyone cut out images and get them to put them into a male or female box on the table. Once everyone has done it, pour them out on the table and look for themes. Materials: cut out images, set for each persons and 4 boxes 4. Guess the Designer – 10 mins Method: Put pieces of design on the wall around the class or on the table, get the to stick coded stickers by them to decided if it has been designed by a man or a woman. Method: Stick coloured coded stickers on paper by image to say if you think its done by a man or woman. Materials: Images of design on wall, coloured stickers 5. Analysis Mapping – 25 mins Large analysis map on the wall, x value = male to female, y value = handmade to computerised. Method: Using images, textures, colour, writing, drawing, post it notes, everyone collaboratively blutacs items to the wall in the place they think is appropriate. Materials: Titles for axis, all materials in room

Collecting | Workshop Tasks

Colour Association Method: Give them all squares of colours and get them to arrange and stick them to a worksheet. 1. Arrange in your favourite to least favourite on a scale or in piles. 2. Arrange them in piles of what masculine, feminine and gender neutral Materials: Worksheets, coloured squares, glue Blank person Give students worksheet with blank outlines of a person, maybe just the head and get them to draw the rest of the person to make it into a man and a women. 30 second, 1 min, 5 mins

Collecting | Workshop Tasks

Image and Shape Association Method: Give everyone cut out images and get them to put them into a male or female box on the table. Once everyone has done it, pour them out on the table and look for themes. Materials: cut out images, set for each persons and 4 boxes

Analysis Mapping Large analysis map on the wall, x value = male to female, y value = handmade to computerised. Method: Using images, textures, colour, writing, drawing, post it notes, everyone collaboratively blutacs items to the wall in the place they think is appropriate

Collecting | Workshop Tasks

Guess the Designer Method: Put pieces of design on the wall around the class or on the table, get the to stick coded stickers by them to decided if it has been designed by a man or a woman. Method: Stick coloured coded stickers on paper by image to say if you think its done by a man or woman. Materials: Images of design on wall, coloured stickers

Results and Analysis | Men Drawn by Men

These are the results of the 5 minute drawings completed by the male members of the class. It is interesting to notice that the men were more likely to stick to just using a pencil or pen to create their image. The drawings of men tend to have someone wearing a shirt and trousers with short hair.

Results and Analysis | Men Drawn by Women

The images of men created by women on the whole used a greater variety of the materials in the room, justing stickers, fabric, paper folding and felt tip pens. This in term lead to more colours being used in the images.

Results and Analysis | Women Drawn by Men

Interestingly when the men came to draw images of the women more of them started to use some other materials more, and their images of women are much more colourful and use a wider raneg of materials, with only two of the men sticking to just drawing with a pen. These images are more collage like than their previous set. Some of the way they have distingushed these figures as being female is by giving them longer hair, high heel shoes and dresses.

Results and Analysis | Women Drawn by Men

All the female students make use of the the materials when creating images of women, leading to this set of results being the most colourful and tactile. Popular colours used were pink, yellow, red, blue and black, with the characters all wearing a dress or a skirt.

Designer was a man and most poeple thought he would be a man.

Designer was a woman and most people thought she would be a woman.

Results and Analysis | Guess the Designer These are just some of the results from this task, and overall people manages to guess the sex of the design right about 50% of the time, a lot of it seems to be to do with subject matter and gender stereotypes. Designer was a man and most poeple thought he would be a men or a woman.

Designer was a woman and most people thought she would be a man.

The man and woman icons represent one person view on if they thought the designer was a man or a woman.

Symbols associated with women

Symbols associated with men

Results and Analysis | Symbol Assoication

These two images are the results of the symbols association, people tended to associate the more scientific looking symbols with men, and the starts, hears and swirls with women. This isnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t the best way to show these results as they have just been laid out and photographed. But it is interesting how straightaway from looking at the pictures you can understand the results, and this is because the nature of collecting the data was very visual, so you donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t have to analysis the results much to gain an understanding of them. These results can now be used to create a more developed infographics piece which can create some visual that uses these symbols and how often they reoccur. The same can be down for the image association task results as they the method used to collect the results were the same as for this task.

Results and Analysis | Colour Association

These two images show an example of how the colour association results looked. From laying all the results out you could see themes straight away but in order to understand the results in greater detail I am goign to collate them and create peice which incorporates all the results.

The process of counting the results was down by hand using big sheets of paper to not down all the results.

Experimentation and Outcome| Using Results to Create Infographics

The process of extracting and organising that the colour data was time consuming and it took a while to come up with a system that would be suitable for explaining all the results. Firstly than counted the positioning of all the results from the workshop, then started to translate this into graphical information on Illustrator.

Next I started to play around wit the layout and information that would explain the results.

Experiments and Outcome | Inforgraphics on Colour and Gender

This is a screenshot of the final piece, the full size version can be found in outcomes folder, that goes along with this project.

Experiments and Outcome | Inforgraphics on Colour Association

Pink is considered a colours for girls and blue a colour for boys. So i decided to see if my sample agree with these social norms. There were 4 shade of blue and 4 of pink in the workshop, and this piece shows tha 3 out of the 4 pink colours are considered to be feminine, with the remaining one split evenly bewteeen men and women. Three out of the 4 pink shade were not considered masculine at all, but all of the shades were consdered gender neutral by some peope in the group. Wth the blue 3 out of the 4 shades are considered masculine, with the remaining one seem by the majority as gender neutral. The navy blue colour at the strongest result with all the of the sample considering it a masculine colour.

Experiments and Outcome | Inforgraphics on Shapes Gender

These two images are made up of all the symbols people associate with each gender. For example 9 people thought hearts were feminine shapes so the female person has 9 hearts in her, and no one thought the hearts were masculine so he doesnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t have any hearts in him. They are a less straightforward way of displaying the information, but interesting to look at because they are complex.

This screenshots are from outcomes I have created from the symbols and objects task from the workshop, the final peice can be found in the Outcomes Folder.

Research | Handing Down the Memory Cloth

These scans are from a research project done by Teal Triggs about the role of women in crafting and design. She was interviewed as part of my ITC report and this lead to me thinking about the role of women in the crafting industry and how

how traditional female design styles like sewing, scrap booking and making things by hand have developed and made themselves present in modern design.

Research | Modern Crafting

This images are some examples of how handmade crafting style is present in modern design, there is often a sense of layering or embellishing a surface and using hand drawn elements and bright colours.

Research | Cath Kidston Cath Kidston is a British designer whose bright vintage style prints have made her style easily recognizable. Her work is often bright and pastel colours, with patterns of flowers or dots, and lends itself to a modern take on a traditional English country house style. The appeal in her designs seem to stem from the opportunity to buy into a lifestyle brand which is â&#x20AC;&#x153;prettyâ&#x20AC;? rather than slick and cold. This femininity and nostalgic quality of the designs is an attractive selling point, especially with her designs being used on items such as tents, which do usually have a gender bias.

These examples are typical of Swiss graphic design which often uses a very limted colour palette, strong angles and bold basic shapes, giving the design a very clean and modern look.. Swiss design is the opposite to the craft inspired design i have been looking at, and is a more masculine design style.

Research | Masculine and Feminine Design Styles

Modern feminine inspired design is much more intricate and detailed than the Swiss style and often uses a wider range of colours. There is often design features which are there to provide aethetics value rather than information.

Research | Paper Craft and Materials

After looking at crafting i realised there is a 3D element to it, building up textures and layers. So i have explore images of making something 3D or raised from the page, and have come across collage images, and paper craft. There is a strong handmade style to these images and a delicateness due to the detail of some of them.

Research | Pop up Paper Craft

This images are of paper craft which is even more 3 dimensional, creating a 3D scene or a â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;realâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; version of photoshop, they ahve been made using hands one techiques or too look like they have been made with hands on techiques.

Research | Incorporating Handmade Styles into Infographics

These images, mainly from the made in england website. The designer Cookie creates and collects design work that interests him and his style has a fun and friendly vibe. He uses paper textures, interesting vector information graphics and simple characters to create this look.

“If a prospective client calls Pentagram and doesn’t ask for a partner by name, I see them thinking, Why did I get the woman? When I walk in” Scher says. Even the women do it” Paula Scher

This experiment was my first tester of creating some kind of pp up paper craft, I used the technique to visualise a quote from my ITC report.

Experimentation | Paper Craft

Create pop up or paper models of situations that female designes have encountered in their career and stats from the research to aid my report.

This image was experimenting with taking the statstics off the computer screen and photographing it to give it a different look.

Experimentation | Creating Texture

I have expiermented with different ways of imosing some of my graphics on to different backgrounds, so that they donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t look so clinical and computerised. This technique seems to be sucessful, the next step is to decide on the type of background i place the images onto.

All three of these paperstocks were used to create the effect of textured paper.

Experimentation | Creating Texture

By using the various paper stock as layers on Photoshop, I am able to build A piece which isnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t so flat and computerised looking as a peice wihich didnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t have a textured background.

The original image I was working from

Version using the womens favourite colours

Version using the colours men associate with women

Version using the colours women associate with women

Experimentation | Chintz Infographics

Working with the results from the workshop I have created these kitsch inspired graphics, each one is made up of top colours that were seen to be feminine, and by repeating them you get a Cath Kidston style pattern. Full versions can be seen in the Outcomes folder. For each one, one of the highest results is the background colour and then the other colours make up all the areas of the rose. These images are highly feminised, using colours, shape and style that relate to women in some way. They are quite bold and garish, and in a vulgar chintzy way they work and are definately a different way to display information graphics, which normally have a very slick clear finish.

Visual tools used to separate design by gender Research and Analysis | Magazines Aimed at Women Research and Analysis | Magazines Aimed at Men Research and Analysis | Book Aimed at Women & Men Research and Analysis | Feminine Web Design Research and Analysis | Masculine Web Design Research and Analysis | Extreme Pink Research and Analysis | Gender in Logo Design

Research and Analysis | Magazines Aimed at Women

The workshop research lead to an interest in the colour and imagery play in design aimed at speicific genders. I wanted to see if the colour palettes from my workshops were similar to ones used in magazines, books and websites aimed at a particular sex. Out of the 35 magazines show here 33 of them have women as the focal image on the front cover. Colourwise they tend to use a lot of red, pink, purple, yellow and blue.

Research and Analysis | Magazines Aimed at Men

With the menâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s magazines only 14 out of the 36 magazine here had men on the covers. 3 of the covers ad women on and the rest had cars or sporting imagery on.

Research and Analysis | Books Aimed at Women and Men

Interestingly places like Amazon and WHSmith, do not have a Mens Fiction Catagory in their book departments, whilst book have womenâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s fiction, mens fiction isnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t actually an acknowledged area. The reason for this could be that men and male orientated things are seen as the cultural default. However I have found some books that have a wider male audience. The womens books tend to use more pastel colours, and more hand drawn or script style typography. The men;s book have very bold use of type and captial letters.

These are some examples of ‘feminine’’ webdesign, also of these example are Amercian and have a scrapbook theme to them which relates to the crafting industry. The designs tend to be bold and busy and make use of photography.

Research and Analysis | Web Design Aimed at Women

This article below is about how men and women use websites differently and how the majority of webdesign is aimed towards mens preferences.

A first-of-its-kind study conducted by experts at the University of Glamorgan has proved that men and women really are poles apart when it comes to what catches their eye on the internet.

explained Gloria Moss. “We compared the sites on 23 factors and differences emerged on just over half of these. This is a massive number”.

The piece of research, into what aesthetically appeals to males and females when surfing the web, has found that websites which might appeal greatly to one sex are a total no-no with the other.

Where visuals are concerned, males favour the use of straight lines (as opposed to rounded forms), few colours in the typeface and background, and formal typography. As for language, they favour the use of formal or expert language with few abbreviations and are more likely to promote themselves and their abilities heavily.

With the internet doubling its size every two to three months, it is now more important than ever for websites to catch the eye of their target market. Gloria Moss, Research fellow at the University of Glamorgan Business School teamed up with statistician Rod Gunn and Krzysztof Kubacki to conduct the research to discover if businesses and organisations are making the most of their web presence to help them reach their particular target audiences. “We started off by looking at the personal websites created by 60 university students, 30 male and 30 female, to discover whether there were any major design differences. We looked at factors such as language, visuals, and navigation - the differences were immediately apparent,”

A selection of the University websites was then shown to a group of individuals of both sexes who had to rate their appeal on a scale. In almost every case women preferred those sites designed by women and men showed a preference for those created by men. “The statistics are complicated, but there is no doubt about the strength of men and women’s preference for sites produced by people of their own sex,” said statistician and co-researcher Dr Rod Gunn. The research team applied these findings to measure the aesthetic values in the websites of 32 Higher Education Institutions.

Examples of comapnies who speicalise in desgining websites aimed at female markets.

Research and Analysis | Web Design Aimed at Women

“We were particularly interested in the education sector because its target audience is almost equally balanced between the sexes. In fact the proportion of females in the student body has settled at slightly more than half in recent years,” said Gloria. Despite the parity of target audience, the results found that 94% of the sites displayed a masculine orientation with just 2% displaying a typically female bias. Interestingly the University of Glamorgan’s own website, which was not included in the study, was found to be one of the most equally balanced in terms of visual design. Further research found that the majority of sites, 74%, were produced by a man or a predominantly male team while just 7% were designed by a female or female team. “What we have found is that organisations are not considering how they can tailor their websites to appeal to their entire target audience. If this is true for education institutions, then it is also very likely to be true for businesses who are not attaining their potential because their website isn’t meeting the visual needs of their audience. “If website flow is to be maximised, greater attention needs to be given to the production aesthetic used and the consequent appeal websites will have to their target markets. Given the strong tendency for each sex to prefer the output of its own sex, it does not make sense to attempt to appeal to women using an aesthetic which is largely male.”

To throw more light on the study in a business context, the study moved on to a random selection of student websites from France and Poland. Differences between the male and female websites emerged that were similar to those emerging in the UK. “This is an exciting finding,” said Rod Gunn. “It shows that these differences cross national boundaries, and have implications for websites globally. Businesses definitely need to sit up and take notice.” A separate study on the beauty and angling websites was presented at the ‘UK and US Academy of Marketing Conference’, the world’s most prestigious marketing conference. Explained Gloria, “The beauty and angling industries have very polarised markets. You might expect the differing natures of these markets to produce different kinds of websites, but in fact our study shows that they are remarkably similar. They are both modelled on the male aesthetic.” While expectedly 77% of angling websites are designed by men, more surprisingly 78% of the female orientated beauty websites were also drawn up by men. Continued Gloria, “The absence of a female web aesthetic in the beauty websites would make these sites less optimally effective than they could be. This is the first study to really tackle this issue in any depth and its findings could have a big influence on how businesses and organisations utilise their web space. It is no longer satisfactory to assume that an ‘effective website’ is perceived in the same way by all visitors.”

Research and Analysis | Web Design Aimed at Men

There is also a market for specifically masculine website, compared to the womens, they use much more subdued colour palettes, There is also more structure to the pages. But as the article on the previous page mentions, most web design is all designed to appeal to the way men work rather than women, so their isnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t as much of a demand for masculine specific webdesign.

Research and Analysis | Extreme Pink

This project has raised the issue of colour and gender assosication. Pink is a colour that used to assosicated with boys but now is strongly assosicated with girls, so much so that people have started to campaign against the mass of Barbie pink exposed to young girls.

Two mothers have called for a boycott of a major toy seller in protest at the “pinkification” of girls’ Christmas presents. A group of women in America are snapped Christmas shopping Twins Abi and Emma Moore want families, manufacturers and schools to think more carefully about the toys they provide. They claim gifts which emphasise being pretty and dainty could contribute to low self-esteem and eating disorders. The Early Learning Centre is one of the worst offenders for gender stereotypes and its products should be avoided, the mothers argue. The sisters say it should not describe itself as a learning centre because it stocks toys that can send “narrow and damaging” messages to children about what it is to be a girl or a boy. They have created a web campaign and Facebook group called Pink Stinks to raise awareness of the issue, name and shame toymakers and encourage mothers to contact their MPs. It’s not natural and it wasn’t like this when we were growing up in the 1970s Mother Emma Moore, who set up Pink Stinks with her twin Abi.

“It began because I’ve got two daughters and Abi has two sons so we started noticing the differences between our houses,” Emma told Sky News Online. “It’s shocking, mine is full of pink stuff and Abi’s is full of dinosaurs.” They argue there is not enough choice and too many toys focus on appearances or feature princesses seeking Prince Charming. The examples they give include a dressing table and make-up kit aimed at three-year-olds and baby booties designed to look like high heels. Picking pink is not innate in little girls, Emma believes. “It’s not natural and it wasn’t like this when we were growing up in the 1970s,” she said. But a spokeswoman for the Early Learning Centre denied the chain offers too many pink products. “Customers can choose a red kitchen, a blue kitchen, a blue cash register, a yellow dolls house or a gorgeous farm,” she told Sky News Online. “Our photography features boys ironing, girls playing with space aliens, boys playing with dolls, boys cooking and pushing buggies, girls building and playing with remote control insects. “We offer anyone who wants to buy toys so much to choose from that no one should feel disappointed when they walk into our stores.”

Examples of feminine logo designs

Research and Analysis | Gender in Logo Design

There is also a demand for feminine logo design especially as more women are setting up there own businesses. The demand comes from those wh do not want to stick to tradtional masculine defualt which tends to come with logo design,, of having something very clean and simple with a very limited colour palette. Feminine logo design tends to psuh away from that, by having more detial, various typefaces and colours in the logos. They are often bright, modern and eye catching.

Common Themes in Logo and Webdesign for women Dots Flowers Patterns Birds Bows Common Colours <--- Bright <--- Pastel Textures Stitching

Examples of more traditional logo design.

Conclusion

Throughout this project I have learnt how to collect research in a visual way, which is something I don’t think I had done much of in the past, I found that by doing the workshop with the first year to collect results from them was a very good method of collecting data. It was great getting them to do a task and then straightaway be able to see themes and patterns within the results. This project has pushed me to look at design and break it down and look for defining features that make something fall into a particular category. I have had to analysis a large collection of data and make easy to understand visual results from them. One of the downfalls of this project would be that I didn’t have a clear direction early enough of a specific path that I wanted to explore, so instead I looked down 4 pathways. I found it tough thinking up an area that would be a visual mirror of my ITC report, because my report was looking into a social issue that wasn’t to do with a particular type of design or technique. This lead to an exploration of the 4 categories this was interesting and provided variety I think having 2 might have been easier to cope with and that I would have been able to do more detailed analysis of my results and created more experiments and outcomes.

I think the final outcomes that I have created have been successful, they were time consuming as I hadn’t down anything like them before, and there was a lot of playing around with the how I was going to display the data before I found ways that worked well for my data. I think I could take the infographics forward and develop more of them as the data can be analysed and displayed in many different ways.