My first consultation concluded that I was off track as my initial concepts had no messages behind it. I came up with a few other ideas, and am going ahead with idea A!

A:
Concept: What makes a man
The four jobs: Coursing river, Great Typhoon, Raging Fire, Mysterious Moon
Message: Women can have these qualities too!
Tone: Parody of Mulan’s “I’ll Make a Man Out of You” 

B:
Concept: What makes a housewife
The four jobs: Caregiver, Chef, Housekeeper, Teacher
Message: Housewives / mothers are everything. They are multi-talented, and they seem to be able to juggle everything.
Tone: Cheerful / appreciative?

C:
Concept:  Shortcuts to be rich
The four jobs: Tai tai, Bank Robber, Drug Lord, A Rich Character
Message: Everybody wants to be rich, but is there really a shortcut to it?
Tone: Satirical

D:
Concept: The hidden work behind an animation
The four jobs: Producer, Pre-Production Artist, Production Artist, Post Production Artist
Message: People so easily enjoy the work they see on screen, but most don’t know how much work and time is put into it.
Tone: More serious?
– I am also considering adding a twist to make the above concept more ‘me’ by using ‘Jack’ as my name (ironically). Because of the phrase, ‘Jack of all trades, master of none’, because I am a generalist.

Since this project was more typography based, I thought about how I could make use of types to express the various verbs (swift, force, strength, mysterious). I decided to experiment with using the formatting of the fonts, such as bold, italics, and stuff like that.

Swift as a Coursing River

Hmmmm how to express coursing river? Italics was used in hopes to express movement, like swoosh. I started off with the imagery of river contours in mind, using blue as a base colour, and eventually delving more into using hints of turquoise and teal.

I also experimented with moving the alphabets around, as if they were carried by the water current. However, I thought that it wasn’t expressing ‘swift’ and ‘coursing’ enough as the visuals seemed calm instead of quick.

Eventually, I tried to overlay various images of water, and drew some bubbles, attempting to make it seem more like a coursing river, at the same time complementing the alphabets and filling some negative space to make the visuals more interesting and less plain. 

As I was working on this, I also saw this video: https://www.facebook.com/culturacolectivaplus/videos/1583477421669715/

and super loved it. Went back again in hopes of finding some references and inspiration and noticed how effective the use of the oil/ink/soap videos was. Yyyyes, oil, ink, soap imagery is bae.

So I grabbed this one and overlaid it on the existing design, experimenting with different blending options.

More experiments with the movement of the alphabets. 

This one is my favourite so far. I thought the ink helped to represent movement as they looked like the bubbles you would see in the movement of water.

Force of a Great Typhoon

Don’t have much for this yet, except some possibly relevant imagery.

Thought of using trippy neon colors coming into blend because typhoons remind me of a huge blender that blends everything (represented by a mish mash of random colors) up. The base colours blue and green would represent the sea and land in this case. This is still a mess, have yet to be developed!

Strength of a Raging Fire

The text is in bold because well, strength of a raging fire. Didn’t want to use a typical fire imagery for this and used bold and expressive brush strokes as inspired by the ruggedy-ness in David Carson’s works. Half way through, I thought of how the brush strokes reminded me of Red Indians’ face paint and I did some research and experimenting with that, as Red Indians are commonly known to be fierce and strong warriors. 

Mysterious as the Dark Side of the Moon

Experimented with hiding the type for this, because, mysterious means not revealing everything easily. Also tried different ways I could hide the types. The drawing of the moon was from an old work. Played around with using different colors and I preferred a dark moon because of the contrast it gives plus it could better represent the dark side of the moon better. The cropping around was again inspired by David Carson’s works.

Tried to use an image of the moon like this one but it didn’t really work out.

Moving forward after the group consultation, I am going to try to think of other possible messages these four ‘jobs’ can indicate as well as how I can better tie my visuals to my message.

I should also be thinking more about helping the type fit in with the designs instead of looking like it’s overlaid.

If all goes well, I can start test printing soon!