Meeting with Simone recap

This post is a little late, as I had my first supervisor meeting with Simone on Tuesday.  I felt like the meeting went well, I managed to get across my ideas and Simone asked a lot of questions which helped to streamline my focus a bit.  After I explained that my project would be looking at the relationship between image and typography, and that my practical project would be to create a body of visuals promoting the practice of mindfulness.

  Straight away Simone said that I if I was doing so, I would need to define mindfulness more as at the moment just saying "mindfulness" was too general.  She wanted to know what area, and what practices  I would be centring my work around.  Her next question was how I would present the visuals.  At this point I was thinking about a series of posters and information leaflets, however she made the point that leaflets were the kind of thing that would be iced up at a health and wellbeing fair - not the kind of place my envisioned target audience would be going.   She suggested that I stick with the posters but instead of a leafier create a series of visuals for the web, such as banner ads and a mock prototype of a website.  With regard to that, one of my jobs for this week is to look at web-based mindfulness materials, in particular apps designed for the mobile/tablet market.

Because I was clear about wanting to move away from the traditional new age visuals that can put people off trying mindfulness and meditation, Simone told me to look at what was already out there that was of the style that I did not want to do.  Coincidentally I mentioned Hay House books as an example of an aesthetic I don't want to go for, and Simone was able to recommend some spiritual people to look up as she used to work for Hay House in Australia.  She had a quick look at some of the names she remembered and we noticed that a few of them were moving into Twitter to connect with more people, so another task for me is to look at how content has been adapted for social media.

With regard to my dissertation topic, Simone recommended going back and looking at the history of graphic design, including Bauhaus aesthetics and making & breaking the grid.  If I am to take my designs forward, I need to know their history.  She also suggested looking at the Futurists, and in particular concrete poetry such as Zang Tumb Tumb and onomatopoeic poems.

Finally, I was asked to have a clear idea of what my target audience is and where I would expect them to go after viewing and interacting with my work.  This I will have to think about a lot more, as it is obvious I need to get real specific.