An exercise in shapes

 After speaking to Dave about branding something that wasn't usually "brand -able" and my recent research on shapes and emotions, I got a random little idea to convey moods/outlooks using only shapes.  Starting out with simple optimist/pessimist/realist, where I used the shapes I felt linked most with the mind frame (although this is of course subjective) and black and white contrasts.

Fig. 1

Fig. 2

Fig 2 - expanding on Figure 1 and playing around with the representation of the moods.  I chose blue and an orangey yellow as they were colours typically associated with happiness and sadness, respectively.  It is only looking at these again now that I see something in the pessimist (left) row and optimist (middle) rows - the blue rectangle suggests the sea which in terms of rhetoric is linked with struggle and feeling overwhelmed; the yellow circle is an obvious link to the sun.  I didn't think about this when I was first constructing the shapes; the angles of the rectangle were chosen for pessimism because I think of a spiky, hard outlook, compared to the soft circular shapes I associate with optimism.
Overlaying the shapes and switching up the fills and outlines also made me think about how I could use the shapes to suggest something happening in the mind, for example the top left piece where the yellow outlined square appears to be sinking into the deep blue, or the space created by the pathfinder tool in the bottom right corner for the realistic outlook.

When I was at this stage I started to think that I had seen something like this before…and I was right! This project by Patrick Smith was evidently floating around my conscience when I was sketching out these works.  I had also been looking at minimalistic posters on philosophy by Genis Carreras after Dave suggested branding a philosophy movement.  This research combined with my recent findings on shapes, colours and emotions, and looking at other artists such as Olafur Eliasson's Turner Colour experiments all fed into this.  

  At the time I was also reading a lot of articles on mental health (it was mental health week earlier this month) and the suicide of a friend of a friend who had been in her early twenties had me thinking a lot about experiences of people close to me concerning mental health problems and the stigma that is still there.  It is apparent that the conversation around the subject is growing, but there is a long way to go and  I am starting to consider bringing mental health awareness into my project research.   This is why I chose to do the experiments posted below.  I do not know yet if this would be a final subject matter, but in terms of my research question which is rooted in visual persuasion, it is certainly a starting point that is loaded with opportunities to try stuff out.

Mental health disorders as shape compositions

Using shape, colours and textures, I aimed to depict some mental health conditions and give a small indication of the nature and experience of the condition as far as I knew.   These were created in Illustrator CC.  

Anxiety 

 Anxiety was interesting for me because I have had some experience with it in real life.  The red circle is meant to indicate the person feeling the anxiousness - anxiety sufferers are always on high alert to feelings and worries and can often have a nervous energy about them which red suggested for me.  The square was added to give an impression of the boxed-in, narrowed outlook feeling that people with anxiety feel, as it can be very limiting when negative thoughts and subsequent exaggerated worries take over.  The grey background continued this feeling of having a bleaker outlook - anxiety is pretty draining and can easily sap the fun out of a lot of life's aspects.  I added paper textures which I downloaded a while back from a royalty free giveaway - they do not belong to me but permission was granted to use them in personal and commercial work.  I feel the added textures give more depth and an almost tactile element to the picture.

Bipolar disorder

For bipolar disorder I felt pink was a good high-energy colour to indicate the mania cycle, in comparison to the depression cycle which I used a blue for.

Depression

For depression I chose a palette that I think is widely associated with low mood and poor mental health.  Through a mix of textures and colour I made the blue in the circle look like a body of water swallowing up the circle, which I felt linked with the heaviness that comes with being depressed.   The circle was kept black as a direct indication of the black mood many depression sufferers feel.

Obsessive Compulsive Disorder

For OCD I chose the background as the colour highlight, with yellow and pink gradient.  These colours are not associated with low mood, rather a high energy that verges on being irritable (it has been shown in studies that high yellow and lighter pink can initially create happy feelings but after a while cause agitation and sometimes even aggressiveness).   The neat black squares were placed to hint at the element of the compulsion that demands everything be just so.  One accident which I kept in was the placing of the texture on the square on the far right, which has a tear in it.  To me that suggests the fragile nature of someone with OCD - if a compulsive's routine is disturbed it can be very easy for them to feel unravelled.

Schizophrenia

I chose a circle to represent the person for schizophrenia, with shapes infringing on it's edges meant to represent the other personalities or facets of an identity.  

Seasonal Affective Disorder

 S.A.D is the bane of my existence come winter time, so for me this is an accurate visual representation of the state it brings  I chose a more fluid shape for this one because it is a mood that is not fixed or permanent, and for me it creeps in slowly and does the same as it lifts.  The black overshadowing the kind of hopeful outline of the brighter yellow shows that there is an end in sight to the condition, but that the low mood i.e the filled in black shape is a lot more prevalent and difficult to lift at time.  The dark blue background I chose because that is the kind of weather that causes S.A.D.

Manic depression

Manic depression is another name for bipolar disorder, but I felt that there was more than one way to represent it so I tried this one out too.  The pink background was again chosen for the hyper element, with the black and white rectangles suggesting a scale.  I split the circle in two to show the (simplified) nature of the condition.

Post Traumatic Stress Disorder

I imagined the feeling experienced during a PTSD episode to be something like the above, although I have never had the experience myself.  The sharp edges of the "angry" triangles stab into the circle which is blue and quite calm.  I kept the background black just because I felt adding another colour to the mix might be too much, and it ended up working well in the visual depiction of the emotions associated with PTSD.

Where to go next with these

I have been experimenting with illustrated QR codes (which I will write about in an upcoming post) and I have begun to think about if they could be used in conjunction with animated versions of the above to bring a digital element and a level of further digital engagement to a mental health campaign.  I have been looking a lot at gifs and how they serve as automatic advertisements, particularly on social media platforms.  In the next week or so I will try out making some animated gifs and using a QR code generator to link to them online.  I have also been looking at bringing in physical elements to my QR codes which I will post about this week, so it is likely that that could be brought into this process too.