Nest Article and Illustration (by Fran!)

The majority of young people don’t vote and worryingly, this isn’t surprising. This is not only due to the low turn out of young voters during this recent election but you just have to look around you to see such a small majority of students to be interested in any type of cause or current issue and there is a real lack of campaigning because of this state of mind.

Art students in particular have had a history of being at the forefront of political campaigns. An example of this is in the occupation of the Ecole des Beaux Arts by students to establish the Atelier Populaire (the Popular Workshop) in Paris, May 1968. The organisation went on to produce hundreds of silkscreen posters in an unprecedented outpouring of political graphic art. In a statement, the Atelier Populaire declared the posters “weapons in the service of the struggle” as the protestors’ grievances during the uprisings are put into print.

Over time and per generation, students seem to have become less and less interested in current affairs and more and more interested in ourselves and personal achievements but the main reason why so many young people don’t vote is that the current political system is so unappealing and doesn’t seem to work.

The first-past-the-post system makes it near impossible for any real change to happen within government and politicians tend to talk about issues that don’t relate to our needs and problems.  Their dodging of questions and passing of blame is seemingly part of their job description which begs the question – why should we listen? As a generation we’re so uninformed and uneducated about the complications of the political system that by the time we are supposed to engage with it through our democratic right of a vote, most don’t bother as it seems too confusing and lacks the cheap thrills we now strive for in modern day-to-day life.

My interest in politics was little to none until I started my study at a higher education. If politics were made compulsory somewhere in the national curriculum we would have a much larger majority of young people engaged in politics and have their voices heard where many fail to shout loud enough.

The lack of interest may also have come from the increased tuition fees. Whereas University was a time to find out more about yourself and start to engage with the world around you, now students are worried about making this time count to achieve their degree and progress towards their future career. As David Mitchell suggests, ‘Maybe we’re too poor a civilization to make room for that anymore’.

So why do students need to engage with politics? It could be said that generations may be lost through the lack of representation if this disengagement continues. Politicians ultimately make policies for those who vote. We are in danger of losing our power to change the things that matter to us.

We as students, artists and visual communicators have so much power in our hands to make a change but seem to be focusing too much on form, commercial and corporate work. It can be argued that as artists, we seem to be ignored by our current system and it is more than time to come together ourselves to really provoke change with our work. Almost 50 years later, maybe it’s about time for our own Atelier Populaire?

Designing the rest of the Yearbook

This was quite a daunting part of the yearbook design as I pretty much had free reign of what to do with it. After lots of experimenting this is what I came up with:

The Tresco Times has Arrived!

During my Nixon Placement I contributed to one of the pages of the Tresco Times Magazines and I have finally received a copy of it!

Photo shoot for Yearbook

We did the photo shoot for the yearbook today. It ended up taking quite a long time because it was really hard to get the lighting right. I had to be there to make sure they left enough space for text. These are the images we got for the front and back pages:

FRONT COVER

BACK COVER

We also took some photos to go in the first and last couple of pages because david was wondering whether it would work to have the backgrounds photographs. This is what we came up with:

Creating Yearbook Biographies

This was quite a straightforward part of the design for the yearbook as I used Tom Hoare’s guide for the previous year. I am actually really enjoying this process, its quite addictive because its a bit like solving a puzzle.

I think overall it looks really professional and I have shown quite a few of 3rd Years and they’re really happy with it!

Here are a couple of examples of the pages:

Feminist Media Network Logo: Finalising Design

I got an email back from Sharon about the ideas I had sent her and this is what she sent back:

Thanks for these ideas. The first is my favourite as I really like the icon to suggest collective connectivity. I’m not sure about the text (which I know you said would be different anyway once you’ve put it in Illustrator). I like the hand-rendered look. I think I would like the ’T’s to be more formed. I also wonder what this style of writing would look like in lower case?

Looking good though!

I took her feedback and started playing around with this idea on Illustrator, which is the one she preferred the most:

This is what I came up with:

Nest Magazine Feature

I was thinking about doing some writing for the Leeds College of Art student magazine – NEST. I had kind of forgotten about it but during Easter Josiah, the editor of the magazine asked me if I wanted to create a feature for the magazine! I decided that did really want to do this because I’d really like to practise my writing skills and this would be a very different style of writing compared with the academic writing I have recently been doing.

I wasn’t very sure about what to do it on. I thought about possibly writing about Porn – how its affected society and whether we should therefore change the way sex education was taught. I decided against this because it wasn’t very relevant to students who had already been through secondary school (the time when Sex Ed is normally taught) and so therefore probably aren’t particularly interested in the subject.

Recently there’s been so much talk about politics that I felt this would probably be a good topic. I thought I would write about why young people are so disengaged with politics at the moment and why it is so important to re-engage, especially as artists!

This is what I came up with:

The majority of young people don’t vote. This is obvious, not only due to the low turn out of young voters during recent elections. Just look around you – such a small majority of us seem to be interested in any type of cause or current issue and for an art college there is a real lack of campaigning!! I find this strange seeing as artists and art students have a history of being at the forefront of many campaigns. Slowly over time we seem to have become less and less interested in current affairs and more and more interested in ourselves and personal achievements.
There are many reasons why this is the case. The main reason why so many young people don’t vote is that the current political system is so unappealing to us. Politicians talk about issues that don’t relate to our needs and problems. They also lie and place blame on the wrong people which begs the question: what is the point of listening to them in the first place?! Another reason is that we are so uninformed and uneducated as a generation about the political system that by the time we are supposed to be engaging with it, most of us just don’t bother because it seems too confusing therefore boring to get involved in. I wasn’t interested in politics at all until I came to LCA mainly for the latter reason. I feel like if politics was made compulsory somewhere in the national curriculum we would have a much larger majority of young people engaged in politics.
Another reason for this lack of interest is that before fees rocketed, University was a time to find out more about yourself and start to engage with the world around you. Students weren’t as worried about making this time count towards their future career. David Mitchell suggests ‘maybe we’re too poor a civilization to make room for that anymore’. This is another issue in itself but nowadays it seems students don’t have time for this because they want to do well in their degree. Jobs are so limited for young people nowadays that we are filling our time with internships and stuff that ‘looks good on the CV’ rather than potentially engaging with the political scene.
So why do young people, more specifically young artists and practitioners need to be engaging with politics? There are so many reasons but I think the main one is that if we don’t engage soon then our whole generation will be lost!!! By this I mean, politicians make policies for those who vote so we are in danger of never changing the things that matter to us. Do we really want to be stuck in this time where there’s so much anxiety amongst young people, with the lack of jobs and housing, and our government being governed by selfish corporations?! We are in danger of losing so much and most of us don’t even know it! We as artists and visual communicators have so much power in our hands to make a change but we seem to be focusing too much on form and commercial work. I say it’s more than time to transfer at least some of our time to getting involved in politics and current affairs.
This is easier said than done but as next year’s campaigns officers, Fran and I will aim to make issues that relate to you more decipherable and make obvious the opportunities available to make a real change!

Fran is going to do an illustration for this piece of writing which is cool because it will show that we are both thinking about next year!

Yearbook – Things inevitably go wrong

There have been quite a few different problems with the guide that I sent out. Firstly some of the measurements of the guide were completely wrong! I had to go through and redo so many of the measurements which was embarrassing and made me look quite unprofessional. I have also realised that some of the word counts didn’t work so well as I’d changed the typeface and it seemed to be bigger than the previous one that was used.

This has made me realise how incredibly important it is to check everything before you send a document out to people!

Design Rejection

Unfortunately Belle Isle didn’t feel my design was appropriate for the wall because the centre is next to a church and they thought some of the monsters resembled ghosts. I felt this was a shame because I had put quite a lot of work into the design and I felt it there was a strong link between the community group we worked with and the design. Even so I understand where they were coming from and when we went to start painting the chosen design I realised that it did seem to fit better with the feel of the centre. I think maybe because the mural was really representing the whole centre.

As the other design wasn’t quite finished I am going to add a couple of the animals they drew in the same style that I created the monsters to fit in better with the design.

Creative Conscience: Finishing Touches

I had a play around with some of the ideas Graham gave me and I created a logo out of the phrase I put at the bottom of the image.

I ended up using Ariel font for the text in the middle because I felt this was probably the most generic, boring font that people use.

I showed this to Graham and he liked it but felt that now I’d got the idea I had to design it so that it would work on the Creative Conscience web page. I decided to enlarge the text to make it more readable to the viewer.

I then started creating the logo. I changed the colour of the text to blue and red to represent that this was an issue in the UK.

I played around with various layouts of the type but ended up with this as I felt it slightly resembled the UK.

I showed this to Graham and he didn’t like the typeface because it was quite hard to read. I changed the font to Futura and also increased the tracking very slightly. I changed the colour very slightly and made only ‘arts’, ‘essential’ and ‘national’ stand out because I think these are the key words. Hopefully this has made the logo more readable.

I then photoshopped the image onto a billboard photograph to make it look more professional.