PLACARDS #1

Our project is for the week is to create several placards focused on our protest. It should all be mainly focused on typography. In the launch we were shown few artist work to give us an idea and to understand what’s been expected. In the launch, Occupy London: J Barnbrook was shown with his mainly type posters, also protein man Stanley Green’s work was very interesting. Using these artists as influence we’re asked to create several placards which one in the style of Stanley Green. To start off the project I made a map mind of everything that comes to my mind and researched about artists shown in the launch presentation.

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To start off with I made notes of ket features in each artists work shown to us and they were mainly heavy weight fonts. The work I liked the in J. Barnbrooks is the financial times where he mixed few fonts together. I think that looks really good and very effective. Also, at the end of the projects we were given further research links I searched up Liz Mcquistons work. Her work is very interesting and can be easily applied to our project. It has a strong effect in the posters. The main feature which stood out to me was the ripped effect. This gave me the idea of a sexist quote which then is ripped apart and the word is replaced. Looking at her work really gave me few ideas. I then thought more about these sexists quotes then maybe we could do a stencil and spray them on a big A2 cardboard. This could be done for Stanley Greens placard. I then saw the poster hang up on the wall in the graphics corridor which is a tweet from Trump. I thought I could use the sexists quotes said in the society about gender colours put them in a quotation. Dan already had an ideas about his quotes and about crossing out words. So, combining mine and his idea we said this could be will one of the placards we will make.

I did research about fonts on Adobe Typekit to find fonts which are heavy weight, fits the context and also chose both feminine and masculine fonts which we could use in placards. The next step for me was to find sexists quotes so I did some research and thought about what do people say when a boy wears pink or girl wears blue. Gathered all these stereotypical sayings and quickly sketched them in my sketchbook. The next stage is to decide on the font we will use and colour scheme.

GENDER COLOURS RESEARCH

Doing some research on our protest topic would really help us understand the matter and develop our knowledge so we can produce good outcomes which reflects peoples thoughts and opinions about the topic.

“If you go back to the 18th century, little boys and little girls of the upper classes both wore pink and blue and other colors uniformly,” said Valerie Steele, director of the Museum at FIT, the Fashion Institute of Technology, in New York. In addition, pink was even considered to be a masculine color. In old catalogs and books, pink was the color for little boys, said Leatrice Eiseman, a color expert and executive director of the Pantone Color Institute.

An article titled “Pink or Blue,” published in the trade journal The Infants’ Department in 1918, said that the generally accepted rule is pink for boys and blue for girls. The reason for pink being a boys colour is that it’s been more decided and strong colour. Yet blue is is more delicate and dainty which they said was suitable for a girl. So if the gender colours were completely different back then what changed the concept. Looking into gender colours shows that it is socially constructed, it changes depending on time and place. In the articles, it says that the whole change happened when manufacturers wanted to sell more infant and kids clothes. So they started to colour code clothes in 19th Century before then most children wore white clothes. However, especially in America this colour coding changed as in some states some brands used blue for boys and pink for girls. But in other states it was vice versa. Stores like Best & Co. in Manhattan and Marshall Field in Chicago branded pink as a boy’s color. Others like Macy’s in Manhattan and Wanamaker’s in Philadelphia identified pink as a girl’s color. Artists had a big impact of the colour coding such as 18th Century paintings by Henry Huntington. His painting ‘The Blue Boy’ a boy dressed in blue and ‘Pinkie’ a young girl dressed in pink. To him he had a colour code in his paintings to identify gender. So many people accepted this as the right way and associated blue for boys and pink for girls.

As I was reading some articles I came across even in 1884 FDR was photographed at the age 2 and dictated that boys wore dresses until the age of 6 or 7. In todays society, a boy wearing pink is seen so rebellious and against the masculine culture which they are immediately labelled as ‘gay’ or ‘not manly’. It’s clearly not acceptable for boys to wear dresses in todays society.

fraklin Franklin Roosevelt wears a dress, New York 1884.