After trying out my initial ideas I knew I wanted to keep my placard quite simple with large text and a simple colour scheme to make it as easy to read as possible. I sketched out two more ideas in which I have taken phrases from my initial page and incorporated them into a design.
The first idea was using the phrase ‘how many times do you have to see it to believe it’, this relates to our initial manifesto and is about the issue of people hearing about mental health or seeing people with mental health issues all around them, but still choosing to ignore that it is a real issue. I wanted to use the repetition of the word ‘mental illnesses’ as a visual metaphor for people seeing it over and over again in real life.
For my second idea I used the quote ‘I don’t control my own thoughts’. I think using a quote from someone with mental health issues is very moving and will make the audience think as it comes from the mouth of someone who is effected. I thought back to our manifesto and the idea of illusion and wanted to put this together with the idea of using a head that is slightly abstracted and hard to see. A persons thoughts should be inside someones head, yet the idea of not being able to control your thoughts makes me think the words ‘control my thoughts’ should be almost scattered around the head in an abstract way.
I think the ideas behind both of these have potential but I want to experiment more with the layout and colours etc.
Ben Jackson 