This work that I did for our reportage project. I like these illustrations but I think that I have already improved my drawing skills since this project.

I also have an interest in designing album covers and posters. These are a couple of designs that I did a while ago for my band 'inamba'.

Before i started the course I did my A-Levels in Music, Art and Drama. Throughout my A-Level years I produced lots of varied artwork including these examples of oil paintings.

Where do I fit? – Bibliography

‘What Is Design?’ A Definition of the Function Complex
Taken from: Papaneck, V, 1984. Design for the Real World 2nd Edition. London: Thames & Hudson

‘What is Design’ By Marcus Fairs
http://www.icon-magazine.co.uk/issues/018/whatisdesign.htm

‘Mindless Propaganda, Thoughtful Persuasion’
Taken from: Pratkanis A and Aronson E (eds) (2001) Age Of Propaganda – the everyday use and abuse of persuasion, New York, Freeman

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/visual_communication

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advertising

http://www.guuui.com/posting.php?id=1667

http://portal.leeds-art.ac.uk/moodle/course/view.php?id=36

http://www.gmarketing.com/

James England – Visual communication Level 1 – Where do I fit?

To me visual communication was just the process of using visual stimuli to convey ideas and information. After researching the principles and other definitions of visual communication I feel as though I have developed a better understanding of it and a clearer idea of where I fit within the field.

The lectures, seminars and workshops that we went through gave me a good chance to explore and learn about different processes within the field of visual communication. I found that some workshops were more interesting and enjoyable than others but I considered all of them to be important as I learnt and experienced something new in each session.

The problem solving session was one that I enjoyed because it gave me chance to design something useful that could assist many people in everyday life. As Marcus Fairs said ‘design is anything that improves the way you live’. I liked the process that we used to figure out what problem we actually were going to solve and the designing aspects of the workshop gave me chance to express and use my creativity which is something that I always enjoy and that is very important to me.
The storytelling workshop also gave me a chance to be creative, but this was in a different way. It was another workshop that I enjoyed but, much like the problem solving workshop it didn’t appeal to me as much as other processes.

When it came to the advertising and persuasion session, I couldn’t get enough of it. I had been interested in advertising and was already quite eager to work with the process. For this process we were split into pairs and given a concept to work with. I really enjoyed the way in which we went about our initial ideas. We wrote down and discussed every single idea we could think of then narrowed them down until we were just left with three or four main ideas to work with. This process came really natural to both of us and I feel as though we could have sat there all day generating and developing different ideas for the advert. However it was still a very comfortable and easy process to narrow our ideas down and eventually choose the final one that we would use.

The task of taking a process and a subject matter and putting them both together came together quite easily for me. The biggest passion that I have in my personal life is my band (inamba) so straight away I wanted to use this as my subject matter. Since I had enjoyed the advertising session so much I decided to use this as my process. It is very important to me that I actually enjoy the work that I am doing and the way that I am doing it. In a way, this module has helped me realise that visual communication to me, is also about the practitioner being happy with what he/she is communicating and how he/she communicates it. To realistically combine the process of advertising with an unsigned rock band I decided that television adverts and magazine adverts would be something that would come after the success of the initial advertising and promoting. I started looking into it as more of a scheme to gain publicity for my band. I bullet pointed the obvious ways to promote the band’s name and image such as posters, emails, flyers, myspace and cost effective merchandise such as badges and stickers that could be given away for free.

I found myself once again writing and sketching out every idea I could think of to get me started. I was beginning to come up with publicity stunts to boost the profile of my band. I thought that a few of the ideas could realistically be done and could work effectively. One example of this was the idea of having a half naked girl walking through Leeds with my band’s logo all over her body. I figured that lots of people would take photographs of this and that the photographs could end up in newspapers and maybe even regional news. This would have everybody asking the question, who are inamba? It was something that made more sense as I looked into it, the image of a half naked girl does fit very well with the image my band has at the moment. The newspapers would be getting a free picture of a half naked girl which is something that newspapers and other magazines are usually always after. The use of sexual references is becoming more and more common throughout advertising in the modern world. I think that if this idea was done correctly it could realistically work and we would be getting free publicity in magazines and newspapers if everything went to plan.

From this idea and others similar to it, I discovered the concept of Guerrilla Marketing. I researched this on the internet to gain a deeper and broader understanding of the processes involved within Guerrilla Marketing. I realised that what I was doing was in many cases a form of Guerrilla Marketing. The idea that ‘Instead of money, the primary investments of marketing should be time, energy and imagination.’ (Taken from:http://gmarketing.com/) was something that made sense to me and was relevant to the way that I was working with my project. This research helped me realise that many forms of publicity can be very cheap or even absolutely free.

Visual communication is a very broad term and there will never be a defined meaning that will answer the question, what is visual communication? As with many other concepts, processes, terms, subjects etc it is down to the opinions of individuals and could never be generalised to one meaning. This module has given me some insight to what visual communication has to offer me and what I can offer it. At the moment I feel most comfortable exploring the ways in which to communicate my passion (which is my band). I think that so far this is where I fit within visual communication, it is my space to explore and communicate my passion.