Our last assignment was to translate Tim Wise's ideas from writing into image since his blog is so woefully inadequate in the image department. The first part of my process in creating a design was looking through the many ideas in our Tim Wise reader and sketching the ones I felt I understood well enough. There were many sketches, but most were pretty much comic vignettes. I knew this would be a problem for me since I can't freehand very well and it would be a bit much to collage some of the little stories I had sketched out. With this in mind, I took a different route in my later sketches and tried to make them as abstract and conceptual as possible. I did a few of these then moved into Illustrator.
Once in Illustrator, I tried to realize the most abstract design I had made, a kind of flow chart that outlined privilege and choice in the terms of education and job opportunity. I liked this idea a lot but I had hard time keeping it simple and legible as good design should be so I scrapped it and started goofing around with another idea, this one comparing the idea of the "welfare queen"(a term invented by Ronald Reagan in the 1970's about a kind of woman from south Chicago) with the fame of teenage mothers from the MTV show 16 and Pregnant. I looked at pictures of TV in windows -- the kind you see in old movies where a character walks by a shop window and sees a TV playing something -- for inspiration. I traced some pictures and simplified them until I had the two mothers. From there I fiddled with how I would display them, that is, would they be floating or would they be in a real place. I chose floating because I thought it best to keep only the essential parts of the images. I fiddled some more, added some text, and then was finished. I probably spend about five or six hours working designs in Illustrator I didn't use any part of before I arrived at the final design.
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