"Choose Your Fruit Wisely" - visuals for an idea instead of a product

Back a while ago (6 weeks, whoops), I had a chat with my lecturer Dave about my project.  He was really keen to have me to something which did not involve branding a new product, as this is something that has been done many times before and to him has lost it's charm.  Something he suggested was branding a philosophy, which I admit I was not to keen on and have yet to really get into.   Something I have been working on here and there is an idea I came up with quite unexpectedly, based on twisting the nutrition information of certain fruits (bear with me).   After my recent posts on visual identities of movements and certain persuasion groups I thought it was a good time to introduce it as I am working on it.  

My Home Economics teacher from high school used to always warn her students about the dangers of eating too much of a certain kind of fruit.  When cooking with lemon juice we were told of the dangers it would cause to eroding tooth enamel and the irritation it could cause our stomachs, and she sometimes liked to joke that apples were "poison apples" due to the trace amounts of cyanide which are found in the seeds.  Since fruit is touted as being part of a healthy everyday diet, I thought it might be a novel way to properly get started at doing practical work related to my recent research (see my recent post on visual styles in propaganda, also the pro-sugar posters) by creating a series of posters which exaggerated the nutritious content of particular fruits.

  During our time in the drawing studio last week I took the opportunity to sketch out some ideas on paper.  They look a bit David Shrigley-like before given the digital treatment.

Fig.1  - A3 paper with sketches

Issues such as cyanide levels, sugar content and the amount of citric acid in fruits were presented as an issue for concern.    Lemons were a good one to start with, as they are high in citric acid and can often cause irritation to teeth and stomach.  The imagery associated with corrosive materials (Fig. 2) exaggerated this fact and made it look like a bit of a health hazard.  

Fig. 2 - Sketch on paper

Here is a peek at one of the many digital poster versions:

Enamel Erosion experiment - linking to my recent post about styles used in persuasive art, I am playing about with a few different graphic styles for each poster.

This is an ongoing work which I am currently juggling with my research proposal; I hope that the finished versions will be up soon.