Haemorrhoid Awareness Week Development process
Snapshots from my creation route through a card designed to light-heartedly raise awareness of haemorrhoids. Ultimately this card didn’t make it to the final design. I share my thoughts and reflections.
“No comment needed.” I left the message to the audience. However on reflection, it’s a bit dull and I don’t want the viewer to have to infer the message.
I wanted more humour and wanted to pretend that there was anonymity in the team. How to disguise the person everyone knows whilst actually making it obvious? The black redaction line technique came to mind. It’s obviously Ian from marketing but let’s pretend we’ve protected his identity. Nobody likes the budget bleeding marketing team. Can I go further? This is simple and effective but the exploration isn’t over…
I applied the same tongue in cheek method of ‘redaction’ but deliberately left the man at the end of the table in plain sight, to highlight his pile-free status. Is there a gain in humour or impact? Possibly?.. The audience here thought it was funnier because I barely disguised the other two chaps. The message is clear. Be more like Jim.
What I needed was a to punch the joke home. The extra text needed to be colloquial and short. I removed punctuation to make it seem ‘live’ and the equivalent of a whispered sarcastic comment at work. Who cares about full stops and capital letters when the message is verbal?
In this image I used pixelation on the characters. I initially tried large squares, but this disguised the identity but because my running joke was that we all know who these chaps are I went for a subtle effect, where they are clearly distinguishable still. And I changed the text to highlight Jim’s smugness when it comes to sitting with piles! It’s becoming a meme. I suddenly began to lose confidence in this. Was there any more I could do?
Remembering that this is a card I went back to the purpose of the task – to send a message. The muted colours in the photograph add little to the story. So I removed them and went monochrome. I brought the colour back in with the bold headline text. At this point I felt that I’d explored every avenue with this image and text combination. I lost engagement with the humour because it was stretched thin to start with. Perhaps it works once and briefly? I was trying too hard, like Ian from marketing. Straining to get more out but feeling the pain building. This visual gag had run its course.
Resources used - Meeting table https://www.pexels.com/photo/group-of-people-having-a-meeting-3931507/ [Accessed 01/05/2020]