REFLECTIVE ESSAY
My goal, with any class I have taken throughout my academic career, has been to enhance my skills as a designer. Writing Across Media has introduced me to the technicalities of media through the modes of communication. Understanding how visual, guestural, audible, and written media are all connected and essential for effective communication has given me perspective on how to develop narratives for my designs. Graphic Design and New Media both require me to communicate narratives through innovative design, and understanding how the building blocks of media work together has helped me develop that skill. In this portfolio I will present three activities that have clearly shown my progress and development as a designer.
Firstly, I am shining light on a simple activity that really resonated with me which is that of the “I am from” poem. Poetry is not something that I would usually engage with. I don’t read poetry, I don’t really know much about it, but this activity aided in the process of brainstorming imagery. Putting descriptive imagery into words has always been helpful to me when thinking up the composition of a visual design. When I am about to start a drawing, for example, I will say out loud what I want the vibe of the piece to be. I’ll say phrases like “I’ll use red so that they look angry” or “I want it to look like it’s moving upward”. But this poem took that creative process a bit further. Using less straightforward phrases, left more room for creativity. I can definitely see myself rewriting poems as a tool for creative brainstorming.
The next project that obviously really helped me develop my skills in communicative narrative was the multimodal project. I had done a zine about sustainability in fashion called “Amalgamate Magazine” in my type and image class. The print I did as my text artifact was almost like a part 2 to that zine. I used a quote from an interview I hosted for the zine as the text for the print. It reads “the most sustainable clothes you can wear are already in your closet”. This was said by Chloe Fulton, a friend and fellow member of the slow fashion community on campus. I added her picture behind the quote as a way to give credit to her. I also linked the original zine at the end of the text artifact page if anyone is interested in checking that out as well.
Finally, I present a discussion we had in class that also helped me develop as a designer. The readings and forum posts we did each week gave me insight on current events. Staying topical and informed of what is relevant is a skill I have to improve on in order to create meaningful designs. I loved reading people’s opinions and interpretations of each reading and how it connected to everyone’s lives and experiences. Particularly in this political climate, and under these strange pandemic circumstances, I think these discussions were more necessary than ever. One discussion in particular that stood out to me was that of the Gestural Mode. I had done my original post about a particular gesture that is used in my culture. I was taking a more literal approach to this discussion. I was analyzing gestures as language just as the readings had done. Some of my classmates did this differently, though. Some were analyzing gestures in terms of unspoken language. They were breaking down how someone's overall gesture and body language can influence the message being sent. This encouraged me to analyze body language within my own culture, and how the “lip pointing” gesture I had originally talked about plays into it.
IN-PROGRESS WRITING
Identity Activity
I am from the desk
From glossier and fender guitars
I am from the humid, sunny, deadly city
I am from aloe vera and wet grass
I am from prieto hair and morrice hips
I am from the tough love and gentle intellect
From the lies told from the whites of my nails and the buttercup’s prediction
From the 3 times I went to church and hundreds that I went to the Chiquinquira fair
I am from the all nighters I pulled at the art and design building
MULTIMODAL COMPOSITION: PRINT
Print and Zine
Different types of printmaking have been used throughout history as an effective tool for communication and social change. Political cartoons, comic books, posters, flyers, etc. are great examples of how designers have used the gestural, visual, and linguistic mode to send a message. For my text artifact I want to design a zine that portrays the importance of sustainability in fashion. I have a few ideas for the content of the zine that I am currently deciding on.
Goals:
The purpose of my print would be to shine light on the unethical, unsustainable reality of the mass production of clothes. My audience would be college students who might not really care about this topic / think buying from unethical brands is inevitable as a young consumer. After engaging with the print(s), I hope the audience will at least be more conscious about how often they should purchase brand new clothes and will hopefully be curious about the “slow” fashion movement.
Choices:
The best way to go about delivering my message would be to illustrate the brutal reality of fast fashion workers’ living and working conditions in an easy-to-swallow manner. I am drawing inspiration from the following artists that have effectively called to action using designs that are “easy on the eyes”
Riot Grrrl Zines
broccoli_boy
Joel Kirschenbaum
Loads of other designers that I can’t name off the top of my head
Some sources I will use to collect data for my artifact will be:
Interviews from people within the fashion community at uiuc
News articles and anecdotal journals about the working conditions and wages of most fast fashion workers. I want to focus on how fast fashion affects the workers, the consumers, and the environment.
REVISED FORUM POST
how body language can influence a message
This is the reply I wrote under Jessica's post: I really like how your analysis of the use of gesture circles back to the discussions from last week about identity. I like how you phrased it: “We are our bodies, and our bodies are us. They represent who we are, and thus, gestures play an integral part in the way we communicate.” People’s body language when they speak can give insight into a person’s general identity. For example, if they are confident or not. Or if they use a particular gesture common within a culture, like the German 3 example from the reading. I am interested to know if this type of insight is also present within dance choreography. Are there instances where a dancer will show a bit of their identity through the dance, even when following an instructional choreography?
This is how that insight changed my original take on the discussion about Gestural Mode:
As explained in Winter’s “Why Study Gesture?”, gestures and language go hand in hand. Using hand gestures during public speaking can actually help the audience feel more engaged. Taking up more space/pacing, using your whole body to speak will help deliver the message more effectively as opposed to being stagnant. Winter also points out that language is a process and not a product. For instance, using language for rhetoric or persuasion means guiding the audience/reader through all the evidence and important points of your argument. The process of explaining point A through point Z is what will persuade the audience - diction is just the building blocks. I like how the author also brings up the point that gesture studies are anthropology and cultural studies. It is impossible to become fluent in a language without also learning common gestures used by the speakers. For example, I know lots of people who took spanish in high school, and even with good pronunciation of the words I can tell it is not their first language because of the lack of gesturing. This video shows a gestural phenomena found in almost all hispanic countries (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y3d7EjcXaeg). In this video, it is called “The Lip Purse”. Similar to Winter’s example of the Tarantino movie, if you were to go to a hispanic country and use your hands to signal instead of your lips you would probably be seen as odd. Where I am from (Maracaibo, Venezuela), these types of gestures are very distinctive in our daily use of language. We are so gestural and animated that simple conversations end up looking like huge arguments to non-spanish speakers and spanish speakers alike. In order to speak like someone from Maracaibo you must stand tall with your feet shoulder width apart and your arms crossed. You must speak with a higher volume and never start a sentence unless you can include a metaphor in it. Using “The Lip Purse” allows you to point at something without uncrossing your arms, keeping the unbothered, “serious” pose. Without this unspoken rule, the entire dialect changes. This is just one example of why gesture plays a crucial role in understanding culture and therefore should be considered an essential part of language and linguistic studies.
*underlined text is the addition to the original post