Collide Research & Development

Rebekah Hollins

Collide Research & Development

For the Collide brief we were asked to create both a physical and digital outcome in response to three themes; happiness, the internet and our future selves. The requirements for the project were to not only address these themes but also explore new mediums and tecniques that we may perhaps be unfarmiliar with. This was to take part in three stages; research, development and marketing.

My intentions of this project were to focus primarily on the topic of Happiness and I started out by asking a range of people what they feel makes them happy. The response to this very clearly represented a difference between the older and younger participants. Older participants immedietly knew what made them happy, with answers ranging from family, friends, hobbies and experiences.

Younger participants struggled to answer this and many of them expressed struggles with depression and anxiety which prevented them from being able to pin point what made them happy.

At this point my target audience became very clear, I wanted to target the younger audiences who were around 18-25 years old. Since the introduction of the Internet and Social media, it has become increasingly easy to avoid problems and issues that an individual may be facing and waste time away on the likes of Facebook or Twitter.

My intentions for the project were to allow the younger audiences to appreciate things more outside of these environments. Rather than sitting and watching videos of other people’s staged lives, for these people to actually appreciate the little experiences in their own lives that can make them think positively and feel happy.

The incoorperation of future self may seem vague, however as part of the digital generation, I myself have to go through these processes inorder to appreciate the little things presented by life and to think positively and appreciate the now. In effect, this is not only intended to make others aware, but also to create awareness in myself.

One of my initial concepts was to somehow incoorperate journalism and scrapbooking into the work. I looked into similar concepts such as ‘Wreck this Journal’ and “Finish this Book” inorder to familiarise myself with the kinds of ways to approach the brief.

I compiled a series of journaling prompts aimed at people suffering from depression and anxiety, things that would be fun but also beneficial in working to improve on their mental health. Some of these included; “Get the people you love to write lovely things here”, “Write down any complements you recieve here” or “Spill your morning tea/coffee all over this page and write down what you are thinking.”

At this stage I intended to create an online community in which all users were able to connect with oneanother and share their pages if they wanted to, creating an atmosphere in which people felt comfortable in talking about their issues and connecting with others who felt a similar way.

One of my initial concepts was to somehow incoorperate journalism and scrapbooking into the work. I looked into similar concepts such as ‘Wreck this Journal’ and “Finish this Book” inorder to familiarise myself with the kinds of ways to approach the brief.

I compiled a series of journaling prompts aimed at people suffering from depression and anxiety, things that would be fun but also beneficial in working to improve on their mental health. Some of these included; “Get the people you love to write lovely things here”, “Write down any complements you recieve here” or “Spill your morning tea/coffee all over this page and write down what you are thinking.”

At this stage I intended to create an online community in which all users were able to connect with oneanother and share their pages if they wanted to, creating an atmosphere in which people felt comfortable in talking about their issues and connecting with others who felt a similar way.

I also created a series of youtube videos in which I tried out the challenges myself as well as getting a few others involved in taking part. My intentions were to create a booklet which included all of the different prompts inside, the videos were then expected to be cut together as a short advert to promote the product.

Check out a video of me doing one of the challenges at: www.youtube.com/watch?v=FQb3JzuhaNA&ab_channel=CraftyRatDesigns

I really liked the idea of creating a ‘Happy Pack’ where the user would get all of the tools to create their scrapboox in a completely unrestricting way. The pack would contain the book of prompts mentioned earlier, along with some card, ring binding clips, assortment of papers and accessories in which they would be able to use as they see fit.

I considered the notebook of journal prompts, and then alternatively considered creating a deck of cards (as shown in the top left example.) This would make the selection process much more random and the journals would be even more unique.

Either way I needed to create the typography for the designs, so I started out with some experimental pieces practising the spacing and lettering in quotes I could find of the internet, this enabled me to gain the conficence to begin creating work for the journaling prompts.

Check out a video of me handlettering at: www.youtube.com/watch?v=FQb3JzuhaNA&ab_channel=CraftyRatDesigns

I soon realised that this wasn’t quite the right approach for what I wanted to achieve, and to create an entire booklet in the time allocated would not represent my skills to the best of my ability as the designs would be rushed and messy.

I decided to try and create the designs digitally, using typesetting instead of trying to hand render each one. This would decreate the time it took to create the designs and allow me to produce the entire booklet. It became apparent after only a few experiments that this tecnique was very impersonal. The designs had no emotion and looked very flat and uninteresting.

I decided to pick out a few of the journalng prommpts which I thought were most effective (such as the larger image to the right) and create more unique and relevant pieces of hand drawn type to represent the kind of message that the words were trying to get across. I still didn’t feel as though this was the right way to approach the visuals and decided to go back to the drawing board...

Jamie Kirk - Tarot Cards

I needed a style that was fun and playful, without making the viewer feel as though the designs were childish. The colour scheme in Jamie Kirk’s work is very limited and I feel as though this allows the playful designs to keep that element of maturity.

The designs are also very visual, Jamie Kirk appears to find ways in which he can visually represent the words in many cases without actually using the words. This is important to my work as I really want the viewer to experimence the words for themself rather than just having to read them off the page.

The copassion for voices video created awareness for a sensative topic, it very much did this through both the use of colour and simplistic design. The colours in the design are very reflective of what they are representing. The different voices are shown through the colour schemes and then the yellow represents the compassionate voice which is a joyful colour.

The design style is very simplistic, it represents a happy medium between childish and overly ‘proper’ design. This allows the design to be much more approachable to the viewer and shows them that the topic, although serious, is something that can be overcome.

Compassion for Voices

I created the initial concept sketches to present a rough idea of the composition I wanted to achieve and the subjects that I would be using. I decided to continue working with the journaling prompts from before but create a different outcome and shorten them substantially.

I created the concepts with the intention of presenting them as posters in later stages of the designs. I tried to reflect the playful elements of the design through the cutesy looking characters and irregular text. However I had every intention to use a limited colour pallete as in Jamie Kirk’s work once I had rendered the designs digitally.

This is a closer look at the type that I used for the designs.

I created them by hand, scaling down the vowels in most cases and any letters I felt would work well alongside others. It worked best with the shorter phrases such as “Positive Thinking” and “Remember Compliments” due to the spacing of the words.

I am however really happy with how the lettering turned out in the end. When I vectorised the letters, I decided not to make all of the edges crisp as it reduced the effectiveness of the playful style, however I ensured there were no irregular edges or sharp bits.

I digitally rendered all of the posters, creating two of the elephant designs as I was undecided at the time which one I liked best. In the end I decided to use the first elephant design as it not only made it clearer that the viewer was looking at elephants, but it also allowed me to incoorperate the colour red into the final composition. For the design with the woman in, I needed to find a way to ensure the viewer could tell they were looking at the figure from behind, to show this in a way that might make them smile, I decided to add a little shadow where her bum would be.

I experimented with a few different colour ways as shown to the left. I stuck to the same set of four colours to ensure that the designs remained simplistic. The “Love Yourself� design felt a little vacant with the red background due to the scale and detail of the character. It worked much more effectively in the mug composition due to the simplicity and also the larger amount of text allowed the cream colour from the steam to remove some of the impact of the red.

I tried to opt for a ‘sketchy’ logo in the initial stages of the design, however it looked a little bit too much like the Intel Core logo. I also felt like it really took something away from the other designs. For this reason I decided to create the logo ‘Positive Thinking’ in the same style writing as the earlier fonts shown.

Combining ‘Mental Health’ with the caption ‘Giving you that glass half full kind of feeling’ clearly didn’t sound right, this was another reason I decided to change the logo to ‘Positive Thinking’ over ‘Mental Health’.

I experimented with a variety of different fonts for the posters, I wanted the font to complement the typography used in the posters but not overpower it when put together.

It needed to be simplistic enough to be readable for the viewer, but quirky enough to fit in with the remainder of the design.

The second and final design were the first ones that I eliminated as they were the least readable and least fitting of the bunch. I then eliminated the remainder of the fonts until deciding to use ‘Caviar Dreams’ as it seemed best fit.

Photos from the Collide Exhibition

i decided that for my digital piece I wanted to animate the posters to add a further element of dimention to the designs. I didn’t want anything too detailed as the posters were very simplistic in style, but decided that it would be nice to combine all posters into one animation which transitions from one to the next with little accents on each different piece.

I wanted the animations to be quirky and evoke happiness in the viewer, on the stills I was able to do this by adding features such as the little bum on the figure. However, with animation I was able to experiment with many more elements. I animated the elephant design as if the elephant was grateful for recieving a compliment, and the cookies being eaten. I think that the little elements really added to the mood of the piece as a whole and the limited colour pallette allowed me to easily transition between each of the compositions.

The music was a little difficult, I started out with a copyright free track which I found, however it didn’t quite feel right and there were elements to the song that made it sound a little too cringe. I decided that, seen as the video was being used for educational purposes, I could experiment with some more popular tracks. Although these tracks did run the risk of the viewer having preconceptual emotions attatched to them, I felt that Pharrell William’s song happy was unlikely to express any other emotion than, well...

Happiness!

Check out the final animation on Vimeo at: https://vimeo.com/163162420

In order to actually evoke happiness from the viewer rather than just to show it, I decided to create a series of greeting cards so that people are able to send compliments and love to oneanother easily.

Although the animation and poster designs do show happiness, by creating these greeting cards it is possible to make the people who recieve the cards happy and therefore achieve the brief to it’s maximum potential.

To the left you can see a photoshoot I did of the images, on the other page you can see a series of mock up examples that show how the greeting cards might look.