During week seven we took part in The Big Draw as a class. The Big Draw is all about collective drawing and aims to remove “I can’t Draw” from our vocabulary, so as a class we were given the task of creating a peaceful protest to promote the use of pencils or pixels. Working in smaller groups, we had to design posters and slogans to promote our point of view at the start of the week and then later on we spent an afternoon in Slessor gardens drawing on the pavement in chalk.
We started of by looking at past activist campaigns for inspiration, we were looking for something with a very simple slogan that would be easy to adapt to our ‘protest’. As a group, we decided not to pick one over the other with two posters promoting pencils and the other two were promoting pixels but neither sets of posters were actually opposing the each other.
Taking this into account, we decided to base our posters on the “Give Peas a Chance” bridge on the M25. From this we got the two slogans “Give Pens a Chance” and “Give Pencils a Chance”. We then decided to link the other posters graphically by using similar fonts to the one used in the graffiti and using almost exclusively black and white. The other two slogans our group used were “Peter Piper Picked a Pixel” and “Save the Pixel”.
For our drawing at Slessor gardens, we decided to do one large drawing as a group, using the slogan “Give Peas a Chance” with drawings of Peas to represent pens and pencils and Pac-man to represent the digital version.
The final part of the task was to upload photos of the day to social media, which I did using my Instagram account
As a group I think worked really well together and produced a cohesive set of poster which were effective in getting our point across. I do think that we could have pushed ourselves a bit more and made slightly more complicated posters, however the posters we made were very effective. I also think that design activism is very important and it was really interesting to see how all the groups responded to the issue.
Lois Faye Design 