That group project blog

Blog 6 The team project

Our University wanted to simulate some real life experience of what it’s like to work in design. Therefore, we were placed in groups mixed across the three disciplines as working as a designer involving being able to successful liaise and collaborate with other people. I was placed with a fellow illustrator, three graphic designers and an animator. Our team leader was Rich, a mature graphic design student whose leadership skills were brilliant. I have previously worked with Rich in our first year induction and I also knew my fellow illustrator Elliot, therefore, I instantly felt at ease with my group as I knew two members well, it was less intimidating. We firstly established introductions and who does which discipline, I have included a list below.

· Me – Illustration

· Elliot – Illustration

· Rich – Graphic design

· Jess – Graphic design

· Hilde – Graphic design

· Toras – Animation

The Brief

In my own words and as concisely as I can put it, our brief was to create some “creative disruption” around campus in the form of three pieces of wall art. This could be done from humour, something shocking or anything else disruptive. The theme we had to work with was “birdhouse”.

The first meeting

In our first meeting we began to think of ideas, I feel this helped us bond as a group as we were all feeling really motivated and enthusiast about the task at hand. One of the first suggestions came from Rich as he was thinking about the term “bird” when used as a slang term to address women. He then elaborated on his idea by suggesting the accompanying visuals were of sultry dressed women on poles and even make the visuals more interactive he even suggested to have a pair of fishnet plaid legs either side of a door and a QR to scan that shows a filter for videos of an egg dropping from between the legs and breaking on the persons head. The idea of the egg referring to birds and reminding the viewer of the derogatory term associated with females. After this suggestion I really thought there was lots of scope for doing something orientated around the term bird being used as a deggroatry term, as where my boyfriend comes from they’re very being on calling their girlfriends their birds, which I have never been a fan of. This opened up a discussion about this as Rich’s perception of the term is that is it a more affectionate term, and one commonly used in his area as such. The derogatory term “bird” in reference to women was the foundation of our project, I felt confident that this was a versatile ideas that could lead to many different outcomes. It had scope to do something comedic, or something informative or even something just plain odd.

Our first ideas

I must admit, whilst I love the basis of the idea, I wasn’t keen on the idea of doing women’s legs splitting over a door, I felt that would insult people in terms of the representation of women with their “legs open”. Therefore, I encouraged our group to explore different avenues of the term bird. After our initial brain storm we took the time to walk around our campus as a group to discuss potential locations for our creative disruption wall art. I feel this also aided our creative process as we were able to look at locations and discuss ideas tailored to certain locations. This is where our next idea came from. We were looking at a corridor in our campus that we felt was a bit neglected. With the previous ideas in our heads of women and the derogatory conventions around them, married with this this corridor, we thought there could be potential in exploring perceptions of women and how calling them these derogatory terms classifies them into a stereotype of something that is owned. The placement of the lights in this corridor and the poor representation of women through this slang made us think of the red-light district. From looking at the walls the lights were placed just above head height and spaced out methodically.

The corridor in question

We also discussed how after doing the illustrations this space with this idea would be easy to make digital mock up of and the light could easily be changed to the notorious red lights as seen in the sex trade of Amsterdam. We discussed that the birds could be actually birds, but scantly clad in provocative lingerie. This would create an engaging and fun piece of wall art, something that would make a student do a double take, as it’s referencing the red-light district, and draw attention to the piece. Originally we discussed how these birds dressed in lingerie could be waving and guiding the viewer to the end of the corridor where we could have a metaphorical brothel. We thought this could be really fun and engaging as the characters could be somewhat flirting with the viewer. Alongside this another idea we discussed was our three piece of wall art and how they could be the stages of the fall of women due to derogatory terms such as “bird” and sexism. We thought we could do this by showing the downfall in three turbulent images.

I discussed with the group that as one of the illustrators, my personal voice in based around heavy line art and therefore the best illustrations I create tend to be of animals so I expressed I would be more comfortable in my role drawing actually birds as opposed to Richards original ideas of drawing women. Because I have such a unique style I showed my group examples of my work so they could gain an understanding of the type of visuals I would be likely to create. I showed them my website, of screenshot of which is below.

I feel it’s important in group projects such as these to know your strengths as a designer. This is pivotal in teamwork as to create a good end product; you want to be able to play to everyone’s strengths. Therefore, its important to establish these early one. Which I did in the first meeting.

Once we had established our strengths, I suggested the Elliot, my fellow illustrator, designs his own stylisation of these andromorphic birds and then in our next meetings we review what styles work and how we want to take the visuals forward. Our first meeting was left with us all agreeing with the ideas and our plan was to all branch of and created sketches and designs for the idea we could review in the next meeting.

Action plan

Ø Reflect on the idea and continue to think how it answers the brief

Ø Sketch some mock ups of andromorphic birds dressed provocatively

Ø Open a channel of communication by creating a group chat

Ø Reflect on the appropriateness of the idea

Ø Communicate visuals through the group chat if completed before the meeting to get feedback

Ø Keep the group on task as some ideas veered away from the brief

Ø Think how we can incorporate technology such as QR codes, animations and VR