Audience:
The kind of audience I would want to target with this piece is just about anyone who has a horrible job that involved a lot of manual labor. I think the pieces mange to capture the stress involved with a work style that leaves you physically exhausted and/or coated in undesirable materials. I don’t think I would want my target audience to be only individuals who have worked on farms before because although the images directly pertain to farm work. The kinds of feelings, emotions and experiences that I tried to capture are ones that could likely adhere to similar “dirty jobs.” I would also believe that my target audience would be that of a younger generation. I think the cartoony style of the images and vulgar text are stylistic choices that would appeal more to adolescent teens and young adults.
Goals:
The goals I set out for myself weren’t particularly complicated. The one in particular that I found to be the most important and difficult was maintaining a cartoony aesthetic for each of my images. I also wanted to make sure that my images communicated the right information, the style in which I chose to draw my images I one that feels like a draft. As a result (as the critiques revealed) the actual picture wasn’t always clear and required a decent amount of explanation in order for the image to be completely understood by the viewer. With the use of color and slight refinement of this draft style I think I managed to push my images much closer to the realm of “easily recognizable.”
Process:
I started off by listing words and emotions that I felt captured the experience that I had while working temporarily on a farm. I then used these words to draw several thumbnail sketches that I felt best captured the feeling and would work with an integrative, deconstructive and geometric design. I knew from the beginning of this process I wanted adhere to a cartoony style (as I mentioned above) but wanted to make sure the illustrative nature of the images didn’t supersede the type of image. Such that each image would still be identifiable as – integrative, geometric, and deconstructive designs. After mixing around a few ideas I settled on my three images, drew some larger pencil sketches, scanned them and finished/colored them in photoshop.
Intent:
The primary intent for each of my images was to convey the “grossness” of working on a farm. I discovered early on in the process the one aspect of farm work that stood out to me as the most unpleasant was not the monotony of some tasks but instead the physical substances you would find yourself covered in at the end of the day. Ranging from sweat to chicken feces and even cabbage slime. Another theme I wanted to capture was “what you don’t see.” I think this is most apparent in my geometric and integrative pieces. I do my best to set up a distinction between what farm labor looks like, a social construction that keeps a considerable distance between the actual farmer and the observer. Then contrast this popularized image with more disgusting (although cartoony) realisms of the type of labor performed.
Format:
For each of the images I wanted the pictures to do most of the talking but (as the assignment required and as I still felt was necessary) I tried to use typography as tastefully as possible. Although limited, I think the text for each image makes a concise and clear point that allows a viewer to fully understand and engage with the image. The tone I aimed for with each image was – aggressive but still coherent. My displeasure with the “grossness” of the farm was one I vocalized pretty readily while working and I did my best to make these pieces of text as true to life, while still being witty. Somewhat like movie dialogue, which can feel real without verging on the painfully boring/awkward because it is hyper real. A recognizable type of dialect that has been exaggerated, but not so far that it becomes unrelatable. The piece I think that the typography was the strongest would be my integrative. I think it achieved a lot of the goals I set out for myself: the text is hostile but not senseless, the text manipulates the familiar into an unexpected truism and the quantity of text is limited such that the image can do the majority of communicating. The piece the typography might be the weakest was my deconstructive image. Primarily because the aggression of the text begins to lose coherency and venture into a more “belligerently angry. It failed provide as much deconstructive information about what a farm is.
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