OUGD401 - Consumerism - Lecture

Edward Bernard

Consumerism was a new invention starting in 1920s in america in order to keep us docile, happy and controlled. This consisted of Persuasion, Society, Brand and Culture. It was the neurologist, Sigmund Freud who first explored the idea of the human unconsciousness and who delve into the idea that all humans suppress our primal instincts. Edward Bernard, his nephew, predicted that our society would erupt in some way after this suppression of our animalistic instincts deep into our unconscious, this is his way of predicting the start of World War I. If modern propaganda is linked to our human desires, success, independence, sexuality then people will aspire for it. For example, product placement and celebrity endorsements will make the viewer desire to become the celebrity.

Sigmund Freud

Fordism was established 1863 - 1947 which made it possible for more things to be produced so more wages can be payed however, an idea of over production is born throughout this. This is the theory that once someone is able to buy all of these products, very quickly people will have all of the products and not need any more. Once they have a car, they will not need another. This idea of a brand and an identity is born in order to persuade you to buy their product instead of a rivals.

In 1909, the advertisements start to sway away from the actual product and are instead advertised as what the product can do for you. This again relates to our instincts as if the product can make you more powerful or sexual and advertised in this way to meet our human desires. From this birth of consumerism we get a shift from a need culture to a desire culture. Brands use psychological techniques to give us the idea to desire things irrationally because of our human instinctive needs. They sell such things as the reassurance of worth where the product is shown to give you a gratification of importance. They also sell the idea of love and desirability to the opposite sex seen mainly with perfume and underwear advertisements.

This system of capitalism crashes after constantly buying and making profit on profit.  This caused the great depression where people were laid off from work, jobless and wages cut. Roosevelt came up with the idea of the 'New Deal' which was the way of taxing businesses to give people benefits. To counteract this, businesses advertised that their products would meet the needs for people in the future. 'Our product will help your anxiety', 'our robot will do all of your chores'. This advertisement technique gives us the illusion that we are happy because we have the ability to buy a slightly better brand of shoes.

OUGD401 - Lecture - Digital Culture & Distribution

One significant digital change was the analogue clock to the digital, the main quality of this is that it is a linear progress that always moves forward instead on cycling around and repeating every day. There has also been a shift from a mechanical aesthetic to a technological aesthetic in the past few years. This aesthetic is clean and simple rather than mechanical. This is mainly seen in recent robot films where the design has gone from mechanical to very human and realistic. There has also been digital aesthetic introduced, this is unrealistic images which we accept as a reality because of our knowledge of digital processes, for example special effects in films. At the moment an analogue aesthetic has come back where people are starting to want retro phones, TVs and lights due to the more personal handmade touch.

We also have a split prediction of Utopia vs Distopia, this is shown in films such as Terminator or the Matrix where we have a paranoia over machines and digital culture. However, there is also the Utopian ideology of working side by side to enhance life which has become more apparent in recent years due to the fact that we are moving more into that age, the more it becomes a reality, the more trust we have in these machines and devices. We also  have to look at the internet to connect us in a digital culture and a way of distributing information. The speed and availability of communication via this process is due to the evolution of devices such as the mobile phone.

The evolution of publishing documents online have made long paragraphs obsolete. The use of short instant messages have made us less able to concentrate on long documents and now with the introduction of emoticons, we have taken a 3000 year cycle back round to the Egyptians, representing our written language using image.

OUGD401 - Study Task 7 - Harvard Referencing & Triangulation

'Disrepresentation Now' by Experimental Jetset

'First things First Manifesto' by Ken Garland

'First Things First Manifesto 2000' by Adbusters

'Fuck Committees' by Tibor Kalman

All of the manifesto texts above touch on aspects of issues that all designers face today however, come from slightly different standpoints and personal preferences. The two First things First Manifestos probably share the most ideologies as one uses the other as a predecessor to write their own thesis. Ken Garlands 1964 manifesto reflects upon how creative industries have been obliged to produce meaningless work for the conglomerate corporations instead of using their talents to make a difference in the world. It depicts that the fault is with publications whom embellish the belief that lucrative advertising design should be praised onto young emerging designers. The belief if reinforced and expanded upon in the Adbusters 2000 First things First manifesto where the blame is pointed towards the designers and mentors themselves rather than the publications. Publications are still referenced when explaining the cause of the problem however, the blame is set with the designers who are effectively supporting and endorsing the meaningless commercial work of companies. The same ideologies are represented in the 'Fuck Committees' manifesto where even the name reflects the authors standpoint on the issues presented. The manifesto focuses on editors and authors loosing their creative independence to the committees and higher powers in the industry due to wages and money coming first. This can be directly reflected back to the 2000 thesis with the quote 'Commercial work has always paid the bills, but many graphic designers have now let it become, in large measure, what graphic designers do.' Again, similar issues are raised in 'Disrepresentation now' where it states that advertising is one of the most representative form of art and that real creative talent cannot be exploited when being stuck in such boundaries.

The image above is a prime example of all of the issues raised in the four manifestos above. The boundaries set by these conglomerate corporations are showcased in the advertisement, there has been little input from the designer responsible as the logo, slogan, text, photography, orientation and colour scheme has all been pre-decided beforehand. None of the designers personal preferences or creative aesthetic has been able to shine through with this corporate design.

The 'First things First 2000' Manifesto by Adbusters explores the moral and ethical problems that face every graphical designer today on whether to sell out their creative talents in order to pay the bills. The text calls out to mentors and publications today which encourage this commercial and inessential form of art, it strives towards a world where society stops supporting these conglomerate corporations. In contract with the 1964 version of the manifesto, the text degrades the designers who support these consumerist values and strives to convince artists to pursue work in charitable causes, educational tools and information design.

In summary all of the texts focus on degrading the committees that run the decisions on design projects. The essential components of the manifestos are to call out upon designers to join their cause and to use their creative talents to expose the ignorance of corporate advertising. It is asked to produce pieces of initiative design which can benefit society and communities around the world.

OUGD401 - Print Culture & Distribution - Lecture

Marshall Mcluhan calls our current age the late age of print. This is down to the late stage of the life cycle which print is currently in. The history of print has been so influential and crucial to the development of culture in the working class man. Where art and culture was at one point exclusive to the upper class and wealthy, the invention of the printing press by Johannes Glutenberg in 1536 has allowed magazines, newspaper, posters, art and other media to be printed on a nationwide scale giving the opportunity for the working class to develop a unique culture and progress as creative thinkers.

In 1963 the working class and upper class first starts to get established because of the establishment and expansion of new tight knit city's and urban culture. The gallery's, art academy's and schools were off limits to the working class so they had to start developing their own culture using printing press. This in turn results in the development and progress in politics in working class culture. Rally's, unions and debates started to advance substantially in working class areas through the use of printing.

John Martin refused to go down the route of a traditional artist at the time by not attending the royal academy and individually painted the Belshazzar's Feast . He then promoted his own working class gallery selling mass produced prints of his painting. The revenue from this business venture was extraordinarily substantial which then inspired a market of re produced art to start to emerge.
This idea of working class culture was despised by the ruling class who thought that this new culture was a threat to English culture in general.
Schools of design then start to open which teach art culture to the working class. Before this the only people who could have an advanced education in art was the upper class students of the royal academy.

Walter Benjamin wrote 'The Work of Art in Age of Mechanical Reproduction' in Germany, 1936. He asks the question, why do people let a horrendous unholy government come to power. He explores the idea that we tend to accept that someone is more talented and important than us. He relates this with accepting that a piece of art is a masterpiece just because someone tells us it is, he explains that this runs parallel with people telling us that our leader 'Hitler' is more important than us.

The invention of photography made the need for painting redundant, it made the idea of a portrait and immortalizing you forever available to everyone. Photography also introduced new media genres such as pornography and the mass amount money making of possibility's in the field of new work. What was only every available to the upper class in gallery's and exhibitions, was now brought to the working class and instead of going to gallery's and bowing down to the expenses of the ruling class, the working class can challenge these pretentious ideas.

In our modern age we tend to like letterpress as it reminds us that print is not just a mechanical digital printing but there is a person behind the print. I experienced this first hand at the Leeds Print Festival last Saturday.

OUGD401 - Study Task 6 - Establishing the requirements of your practical investigation

Consider each of these points in relation to your chosen research question. Write notes about each point considering how you will approach your practical investigation.

1.TECHNIQUE(s)

2.CONTENT

3.COMMUNICATION / MESSAGE

3.RESEARCH / ANALYSIS

4.EXPLORATION / EVALUATION

5.TESTING

Write a rationale for your practical investigation using the following points as a guide:

1.What is your research question?

2.Do you have a hypothesis (an assumed conclusion that you will endeavour to prove)?

3.What are the contexts of your research interests (politics, advertising, consumerism)?

4.Sources of primary/secondary research.

5.How will your practical work answer the research question?

6.What methods will you use to research, develop, create and test your work?

7.Provide a proposed timeline for your work to completion (consider carefully whether you will need access to college facilities).

To consider my approach to my practical investigation, I must examine the deliverables and content which can showcase my hypothesis using visual literacy. There are multiple arguments which are to be put forward in my essay to base a thesis on, I have used these to mock up ideas for a hypothesis below.

• Corporate brands are suffocating real artwork and making galleries and exhibitions obsolete 
• Brands create barriers between gender, ethnic and religious groups
• Brands represent an ownership between the company and the consumer
• A company can sell connotations of happiness or emotion within their brand identity
• The use of nation branding can create stereotypical ideologies within a companies identity
• Repetitive quality within products can create trust and security with the company which produces the product

My practical work must reproduce a statement such as one of the above using visual representations. One way of representing a statement could be to brand a product such as tap water to expose the capability which a brand has on its viewers. A brand can convince the consumer to purchase the product purely by its packaging. This message can be visually produced by trying to sell a free product such as water, air, or soil using just the packaging.

Another way to showcase the relationship between the brand and the consumer self would be to produce two separate pieces of packaging for the same product, one which focuses on appealing to its target audience and one which aims to repel its audience. Both pieces will have the same content however, will be represented differently. I could then gather quantitive research with the final products using surveys and questionnaires to prove the hypothasis.

After reading the book 'On Brand' by Wally Olins, I came across this statement which speculated another possible practical direction ‘Nationality is some kind of seal of quality. Nobody in the right mind would buy Italian whisky or for that matter Scottish olive oil.’ To produce a piece that challenges this statement, I could attempt to create some effective branding for a product such as Scottish olive oil which could alter the stereotypical opinions of the consumer. To do this I would have to dissect all of the components of a successfully branded Italian oil and apply them to my product.

Much like the brand Timberland with work boots, I could also attempt to re brand an existing product towards a new customer market to boost sales and expand their target audience. To do this I would have to find an untouched potential ability within a product to redirect the sales to a new type of customer. Customer age, ethnicity, gender and social values would have to be taken into consideration to find a new direction for an existing product.

Rebranding an identical product multiple times to boost sales. For example, rebranding the same water in three in a brand consistent but diverse way to effectively triple the sales of the product. Giving the water three meaningless yet eye catching names such as 'Mountain Side, Sun Kissed and Ice Droplet' can in theory triple the chances of a customer purchasing the product. Similar examples can be seen in toothpaste products where the company can pretty much rebrand the exact same product to multiply their sales and give the customer the illusion of choice. All of the products below state that they give the consumer fresh breath, teeth whitening, cavity protection and enamel protection however, the packaging design, colour and name has been slightly changed.

OUGD401 - Study Task 5 - Planning & Structuring an Essay

“What is the relationship between branding and The Consumer Self?"

What Academic sources will you referance?

Klein, N. (1999) No Logo, Canada: Knopf Canada, Picador

Lloyd Morgan, C. (1999) Logo, Identity, Brand, Culture, London: Roto-Vision

Olins, W. (2003) On Brand, London : Thames & Hudson

Dinnie, K. (2014) Nation Branding, New York : Routledge

Verma, H. (2010) Branding Demystified, New Delhi : Sage Publications

Packard, V. (1957) The Hidden Persuaders, America : Pelican Books

What Graphic Design will you analyse?

Essay Map

One of the main points to the argument of my essay will be the ethical segregation which brands such as the 'Nike LeBron' shoes create between races. This can also expand upon the segregation of gender equality, cultures and religions within branding. I can explain about the subtle barriers which these brands can create in groups of people and possibly integrate some quotes from Conway Lloyd Morgans book 'Logo, Identity, Brand, Culture' as he talks about some of the ways in which brands effect our culture.

I could also then expand upon the segregations of religions by exploring the use of symbols to create a religious brand identity. The image to the right could also be another possible piece of graphic design to link into the topic and expand upon the issues.

The heart of all branding also stems from the ability to categorise and search for trusted products by specific companies. Many of these issues are touched upon in the book ‘Branding Demystified’ by  Harsh V. Verma where the author notifies the organisational ability that branding can give the consumer when searching for products.

The book ‘Nation Branding' by Keith Dinnie has also intrigued me, I have not read any of the book yet however the title suggests that there could be some interesting examples of how a country or nation is branded and what they use as aids to benefit their nation.

Peer Feedback

It was suggested that religious branding could be a hard topic to expand upon in my essay as there are so many controversial factors to explore. There is also not many factual statements to build upon and the work would come across to be very opinion based.