No News Is Good News: Message and Interpretation

In this project I had to create 3 posters in a 2:1 ratio which were based around a specific subject which I found through my previous research.

I decided to focus on the idea that without independent media there is no way for anyone in russia to express themselves publicly except for government officials. I decided to express the idea that this is the same as having no free speech.

To start the brief everyone drew on paper different words and images to help with idea generation. We wrote down 10 verbs, 10 adjectives, drew 10 objects and 10 symbols in relation to the research and our are of interest within that. After doing this, we quickly had to generate some simple ideas for all 3 posters as a starting point.

The posters each had requirements of their own (One poster just text, one poster just image and one poster text and image) but had to work as a set as well as individually, making sure that only 2 colours were used plus stock.

My first idea for the posters was for the text poster. I came up with a few ideas but none of them seemed to work well or stand out much. I had one idea which I really liked where a sentence about the issue was written in a way that made it look like a TV. i liked this idea because it incorporated a bit of imagery and the TV was symbol for the media.

Unfortunately I forgot that making the TV shape kind of counts as text and image and so I left that idea and went down a different route.

After trying out some more ideas that didnt seem to work, I eventually decided to go down the simplistic route and use text as it is. I wanted it to be clear and eye-catching and manipulate the format of type across the poster to make the poster interesting.

I first decided on the actual words to use which took a long time and I'm still not sure that I have chosen correctly but it's the best I can come up with which gives an idea of what the context of the set is.

The words i chose for the heading were "THERE IS NO DEMOCRACY WHEN THERE IS NO FREE SPEECH". I wanted the words to stand out and have an impact on the person viewing them. The structure of the sentence is quite interesting in the way it repeats itself with "there is no". I thought that it is a sentence that would be eye catching and hopefully interest people to read more into the posters.

The rest of the text on the page is a paragraph which sum up what the posters are about and why they are important. I tried to make sure it wasn't too long and not too large but informative enough for people to understand and be interested by the posters.

I kind of decided the colours while I was coming up with the first ideas of each poster and based them on the research into old soviet propaganda posters and the soviet union flag. The colours are black and red (Hex code #8F1922) with white stock for printing. I chose these because the black and white have the highest contrast and can make maximum legibility and readability of the posters plus the black and red is used a lot of russian symbology.

Originally the posters were black type on a white background but inverting them seemed to make them a but more sinister, probably because the mass amount of darkness is a good representation of bad things.

When I was doing the orginal scruffy idea generation for the image poster I actually came up with some ideas that i thought worked well. When drawing the symbols and objects to represent the chosen area of research I used a TV to represent the media. I then used this same TV image in my initial ideas in a variety of ways but I think the most effective image was using a clearly human figure and replacing the head with the television. I thought this gave a much more human feel to it as though it isn't just a story about mechanical media and machines but affects humans more than anything.

I had a few ideas about this, one of them being the TV headed figure standing and strung up like a dummy. I wanted this to represent the media being controlled and I actually think that it was a good idea but that it needed a lot of development to make sure that it represented what it supposed to. i actually went with the idea of the TV headed figure on his knees with his hands behind his back and head looking down. i thought this was an iconic image and one that everyone would recognise as a prisoner.

I took this idea forwards and started creating rasterised images to use on the poster in Adobe Illustrator. I first took some photographs of an old style box television to be used as the head and then photographed myself in the prisoner position to use as the base of the TV headed character in illustrator.

I placed the images into illustrator and traced them with the pen tool which made a vectorised outline to work with. I think the image works well and hopefully is a bit shocking.

I coloured it red and white with live paint and used a black background again, placing it in the bottom right corner of the poster to isolate it as much as possible and set it up for the next poster.

The final poster to complete was the text and image poster. I had now covered the media side of the idea but thought that I had to try and represent russia a bit more. By this point I had also decided that I wanted to have some shock factor across the posters and to link poster 2 and 3 together.
With all this in mind I worked with the idea of having russia as a dominant figure over the media prisoner. In the original symbols and objects I used the russian winter style hat with the 5 point russian star.
This is a good representation of russia because everyone can recognise what the hat stands for and relate it to russia.
To increase the shock factor I decided to have the figure in this poster not only controlling the media but killing it. I did this by having another figure in a bold upright position looking down on the prisoner and holding a gun out aimed for his head. I then put the hat on his head to make him represent Russia.
I think this works pretty well but I had some issues with the hat representing Russia as I didn't want to be stereotypical or offensive to russian people, I only really wanted to dig at the russian government. Eventually I thought it should be ok in the context and hopefully no one would be offended by the poster.
I created this figure in the same way as the last; I took a photo of myself and traced it using the pen tool in illustrator and then used live paint to colour it, then I just drew the hat and gun using illustrator and following some examples from the internet and thn dragged them all together.

For the type on this image I just used the same headline as the first poster because it is bold and it says exactly what it needs to and also links the posters more as a set.

The posters are designed to go in this order, click the images to make them bigger:

This project went really well considering a slow start with ideas and generating strong, memorable imagery. Refer to PPD for an evalutaion.