After general research into the government and the way in which they responded to the pandemic, I started to build up an understanding of how I can attribute the things which characterise the response to a brand the same way many brands build their visual identities around values and attributes.
The 3 ideas I came up with all used this idea of building a brand but do so in slightly different ways, from simply building a brand, to changing aspects of a brand to show how it would change, to creating a more speculative brand design project.
Idea 1
The idea behind the first outcome is more around showing some of the best parts of the response in an attempt to draw attention to it and, in turn, show how the real heroes of the pandemic have been the public, healthcare, frontline services and similar and not the government. As stated in the previous post, a brand and the way it goes around building up the visual identity around brand values is similar to the way I would look to build the branding around the values we have seen from the heroes of the pandemic.
The brand would be a publisher, both online and print, which would take aspects of the pandemic and use them to create a visual identity which is contemporary and also recognisable as being about Covid. Due to the fact that Covid forced many things online, the online side of the brand would be the most important and would allow me to create a website, app and other online branding tools, however it would also allow me to create a small amount of print media.
FEEDBACK
After feedback from David, although the brand would allow me to create a contemporary design which celebrates exactly the people who should b celebrated, we discussed that it isn’t overly ambitious and David wanted to see me push myself more than jus creating a simple branding project. Whilst the thought of having the license to create a brand from scratch, I did agree that it wasn’t overly challenging and wouldn’t push me enough. We also discussed that the brand celebrated the heroes more so than criticising the government, and whilst this isn’t necessarily as bad thing the aim of the project was to be provocative and critical of the government.
Idea 2
The second outcome was much more provocative and was aimed at being much more critical of the government. the idea is to create a speculative branding project which takes the form of a brand, however the identity will all be informed by the governments response to Covid. The idea is based more off the idea of propaganda and plays on the idea of spin doctors, so the brand would be a visual representation of how the government have ‘spun’ their communications in ensuring that the brand identity at first glance is spun so the viewer doesn’t know its about Covid. The concept would allow me to really play with the idea of propaganda but also be critical of the governments response at the same time, being a provocative way of drawing in the audience before feeding them information about what the brand really is and how the government failed us in their response.
FEEDBACK
The initial idea going into the meeting was to base it all around lockdown, the brand would be a visual representation of lockdown, taking the form of an online brand such as twitch which would encourage people to stay indoors without making that clear, therefor criticising the government. However after talking to David and other peers, I decided that whilst I like the idea of a brand which is spun and dint what it looks like at face value, using the lockdown idea may seem as though it is criticising the lockdown itself and not the way the government handled the lockdowns, which isn’t what I’m looking to do. Instead, we spoke about adapting the idea slightly so it is more about creating a lifestyle brand which doesn’t necessarily do anything other than feed information about Covid to the viewer. This would ensure that the idea of ‘spin’ alludes to the propaganda side and the content within the visual identity itself alludes to the response itself. I think this adaptation of the initial idea is much stronger and allows me to use critical thinking much more, it challenges me more than the previous idea whilst still allowing me to create a full brand.
Idea 3
Outcome 3 is more similar to the previous idea than the first in that it is all about being critical of the government and how they responded to the pandemic. The idea is to change the rhetoric of brands we engage with everyday to hint at the government and the pandemic. I wanted to use well known brands and look at how chaining their colours or slogans using the characteristics of the governments response to see how they would effect the brand and what it communicates.
FEEDBACK
The idea itself was probably my least favourite of the 3, although it would be interesting to see if it would change current brands enough to reach the desired effect and allude to the government, however ultimately I didn’t think the idea wouldn’t be clear enough in terms of being critical of the government, it would be speculative but I’m unsure it would illustrate what I was looking for.
The Idea
The idea myself along with help from David chose to go with was idea 2. It needed some more work on the rhetoric and some of the details such as what the brand would be and how the ‘spin’ aspect would work, however I think the idea is there. As I said, it would be about creating a lifestyle brand which is a ‘disguise’ for what it really is, in order to draw the user in before revealing what the brand really stand for. The idea would use my research into propaganda within the pandemic, in the way the brand spins the governments response into something different and unrecognisable to illustrate how the government used strategic communications, whilst illustrating some of the many ways in which the government failed in their response by creating the visual identity around these failures.
Ben Jackson 