• No1. Process Document – The Importance of Process.

  • No2. I believe in the importance of process and keeping a record of what I have done and how I have arrived at a final outcome.

  • No3. I believe this helps show clients the thought and care you have put into their projects.

  • No4. I learnt this during university by producing a Process Document which allowed me to record the journey I took that eventually led me to my final outcomes.

  • No5. Exploring themes.

  • No6. Gathering research.

  • No7. Interrogating data.

  • No8. Testing out ideas.

  • No9. Distilling my findings.

  • No10. Utilizing different mediums.

  • No11. Self evaluation.

  • No12. Engaging with the subject.

  • No13. Collaboration.

  • No14. Creating physical media.

  • No15. Translating ideas into outcomes.

  • No16. Utilising data and statistics.

  • No17. Learning and reflecting.

  • No18. Illustrating and crafting.

  • No19. Tackling challenging subjects.

  • No.20. Covering every stage of the process, from conceptualisation to final outcome.

Data Project – Final Major Project

The Data project is a passion subject which I started with this publication, which looked at data and how it affects our lives as well as looking at the relationship between data, democracy and fake news. There is a clear link between big data harvesting companies such as Cambridge Analytica and fake news which I hoped to explore and explain. This project has so far been the largest project I have developed conceptually, resulting in several different outcomes to deliver a clear message on how our own personal data can be used against us.

Article – Online News Of The Summer

My final major project started in the summer before my final year at university. It started with a publication documenting stories of interest that happened throughout the summer to help keep the project contemporary and to help capture a theme. My theme ended up being about data since major events such as Cambridge Analytica and Brexit were still fresh in mind and I wanted to find out more about how data influences I our lives. The articles I chose to look at and document over summer. Some of the major themes I decided to look at in relation to data were: Ideology, Conflict, Content, Engagement and Identity.

Fake News Your Prayer To The Internet

After settling with the theme of ‘Data’ I wanted to explore it conceptually by looking at the contemporary issue of fake news, and viewing it as a prayer that people want to believe would materialise, an example of this are the empty promises and fake news produced by the Brexit campaign and sinister adverts associated with it, as a result Brexit eventually became cultural and some people put their complete faith into it despite the lack of evidence of any of the promises made by the Brexit campaign such as the £350 million a week to the NHS instead of the EU claim.

Interviews

During this project I had to gather a lot of primary research to justify what I was doing. I decided to conduct interviews to gather information from a range of different people from different walks of life to see what their experiences of personal data and data harvesting have been like.

Misuse Of Consumer Data

After looking through news articles, social media and people’s experiences of data misuse I discovered that Revolute, a financial technology company, undertook a disastrous advertising campaign where it mocked some of it’s users for being single on valentines day by pointing at the fact that single takeaways had been purchased through them on the day. The implications of displaying users supposed purchases and the number of takeaways purchased shows how careless some companies are with handeling user data. In response I decided to collaberate and art direct some mock adverts with some other designers to raise awareness and accountability with companies and their users data.

Data And Democracy

Data and democracy was the central theme at the heart of this project, showing how data can be used to subvert democracy by manipulating vulnerable people on social media through tactics such as unregulated, targeted political advertising which contain lies and deception from unkown sources. Tactics like this were notoriously used in the 2016 Brexit referendum, particularly in the Leave campaign. In response to the advertising theme I decided to produce a set of info posters which put forward important questions and statements in regard to data and democracy, as well as some more abstract posters which tackle the issue of addiction to social media and technology, which served as vectors for the Leave campaign to spread and manipulate vulnerable people.

365 days of internet cookies

A poster showing how a large quantity of internet cookies can build up rapidly over time.

Receipt Publication

The purpose of this publiction was to act as commentary on China’s Social Credit system and explore the potential consequences of having an authoritarian or Totalitarian Government or Corporation take hold of your data and how they might misuse it and judge the choices you make, much like the Chinese government does to their own citizens. I decided to collect the receipts of items I bought over the period of a few months and judge the choices I made.

Beer Mats

After seeing Tim Martin (the owner of Wetherspoons) putting Pro-Brexit propaganda on his beer mats in his establishments to try and manipulate his customers, I made some beer mats of my own in response. I sent out a servey asking for people’s experiences of fake news, false political advertising and if they have experienced any manipulative material from the internet or in the physical world around them. I printed the results on the beer mats to help give potential readers awareness of manipulative advertising.

MONOGRAM DESIGN PROJECT

I dedicated my design for this project to my grandfather Norman Goundry Pearson by creating a vector file in Adobe Illustrator for machine embroidery. He was a doctor who had won a BMA (British Medical Association) award in recognition of his work in treating and researching lung conditions, which is why I decided to try and integrate his initials with the Rod of Asclepius which is the symbol associated with healing and medicine. This was a challenging project, especially when it came to balancing out the overall design with this set of letters.

FAHRENHEIT 451 - EXPLORING THE CONCEPT OF LOSS

Taking my love of history and combining it with the curiosity I had for the theme of loss, which I was tasked with tackling for this project, resulted in a timeline of all the major historical book burnings in history and contemplating about the vast amount of knowledge that has been lost forever.

THEATRE ARCHIVE PROJECT – BERTA FRIESTADT

The aim of this project was to collaborate with other graphic designers to bring the content of the University of Bristol Theatre Collection out into the public space. After looking through the contents of the archive, me and a few of my peers decided to explore the work produced by Berta Friestadt who was a lesbian writer, feminist, actor and teacher.