Module Reflection | Government

For my second module reflection, I have chosen to review my most recent project The Big Idea. In this project we were given a choice of five words in which we were asked to choose one to thoroughly research and base our ‘Big Idea’ on. When I received my words I was initially interested Government which I later went on to create my project around and Gravy Train. I suppose in a rather satirical way it could be said that they are connected but I immediately felt that there was something to expose with the words.  

Getting ‘Government’ as a word seemed quite fitting with the 2010 election running alongside the four week project. Thinking back now I chose the word Government for more personal reasons than anything, I found myself fairly uninformed about the election process. Throughout tutorials  my tutor expressed a somewhat concern over the fact that I wasn’t sure where I was going to vote, this really stuck with me throughout and made me think “who else isn’t going to vote because they don’t know enough about the subject?”

The project as a whole took me a while to get moving, I think this was primarily because I didn’t know a lot about the subject, so I found it difficult to take an angle on it. As my research developed, the ideas started to flow. I really wanted to create I clean cut piece of work for this project because the word ‘Government’ presented me with a really ‘fixed and accurate’ impression when I started initially working through some ideas. I did plan to create a booklet containing a number of pages, but after consideration and tutorials with other students and tutors I managed to deconstruct the voting system (this was the angle I decided to take) in to three specific stages. The first one being Politic in the media, this I feel communicated the bombardment of media that newspapers and political parties use to sway your vote. I think the fact that I was uninformed about the subject matter to an extent I was able to look past the smear campaigns and see it better in a metaphorical sense. I begun to see the first stage of the election as a maze that the voter was required to make through while the parties all compete in a so called rat race

I decided to focus on the voting system in the second stage. I wanted to show the traditional aspect of this stage, a pencil and paper seemed like a very “old school” way of voting, but it makes it personal and reassuring to the voters. The third section was to show how the government is now in control, its out of your hands and you no longer have a say in the matters at hand. This section is probably the one that I the most unsure about, I decided to show a strong grid structure and use typography to show dominance. 

Overall with the piece I am very happy, I did look back to the brief and begin to feel a bit of concern that I had not gone ‘Big’ idea enough with it but then I begun to consider that going big is sometimes not the answer, in reality and in the commercial world the idea is better produced with consideration to the real world of design. In a previous project, one of my tutors stated that “graphic design should be making the ordinary, extra-ordinary”. This is a statement that I think I will remember when tackling every project.   

Photographs to follow.