No News is Good News: Message and Delivery

This is my final design for the front cover on the brown recycled parcel paper. In order for the print not to smudge on the paper I printed it using a laserjet. The colours work really well dulled down compared to the poster series. It also gives it less of a harsh tone, makes it more friendly and most importantly makes it relaxed and less intimidating.

This is the final design for the back of the envelope. The first sentence is taken from one of my posters from the first part of the brief and the rest of the text explains what is going to be included in the pack.

This is the design for the front of the envelope before it has been printed onto the stock. To make it look more friendly and less intimidating I used a different font for the "planet relax" text and for some of the key words like "calm" on the back.

This is how the final design for the herbal tea looks.

This is my final design for the C.D cover.

This is the design for the C.D that would be going in to the envelopes. On the inside of the envelopes I decided to place the blue horned dust cloud of planet X. I would then make the cover going onto the front of the C.D entirely red to make it look like a planet and when they came together, the image would be that of Planet X.

The two designs above where ideas for credit card sized information cards which had facts about the truth of planet X on them. Below them show the designs I wanted to put on the cords of the herbal tea.

This shows another design from my sketch book. The left design is again for the inside of the envelope and shows a tranquil setting of a bay. The right design is for the envelope cover and shows Planet X centered with the illustration of the bay inside. If we were not limited to 2 colours then I would of used this image because it is very effective and conveys a peaceful message very well. However doing the illustration in 2 colours did not not look very effective, the design needed to be simpler.

This is one design for the envelope. On the left is the design for the inside of the envelope. Planet X streams down from the top right hand corner to the bottom left reading above the words "Its only Sci - Fi." The design on the right is for the outside of the envelope and also streams down from the top right to bottom left, this time with the text Planet RelaX.

This page shows my chosen stock. I decided to use recylced parcel paper because it had a good texture and it was subtle and relaxed. I also thought that the recycling message was important as it might give people hope that the world is not going to end in 2012.

These are some of the items that I wanted to include in my mail shot. As my aim was to calm people down I played on the idea of planet X turning it into Planet RelaX. In the envelope I wanted to include useful tips on how to stay calm. This included a CD with some ambient chillout on and some relaxing herbal tea.

This is some research on envelope design. I found that there where many different styles of envelope and many different materials that they were made from. For my mail shot I wanted a placid and rustic style of stock instead of the grey that I used last. The reason for this was because I thought they grey stock that I used had depressive tendencies and was too dull to work in a mail shot.

This is a page from my sketch book where I came up with some ideas on how I was going to carry out this brief. Upon reading my article again and going over work that I had done in the first part of the brief, I decided that I was going to going to stick with the same principle of informing people on the truth.

In the article it mentioned that teenagers had written letters to N.A.S.A contemplating suicide because they were so scared about the rumours of planet X.

From this I thought it would be a good idea to send out a mail shot trying to calm this particular group of people down.

For the second part of the brief we were to produce a mail shot based around our article and our poster campaign for a particular audience. Before we started designing we where encouraged to think about WHY we wanted to send our mail shot, HOW we were going to do this, WHO we where going to send it to and WHAT we were going to send them.

No News is Good News!

The posters as series

This is my final print for my IMAGE and TEXT poster

This is my final print for the TEXT poster

This is my final print for the IMAGE poster

This is a rough sketch of how I wanted the text and image poster to look. My idea was to use an alarming sentence to catch peoples attention at the top of the poster and then have the tag line "but only in cinemas" at the bottom of the page.

This is a sketched image of how I wanted my just image poster to look like. I decided to make it look like planet X would simply just bounce of the earth. I thought that this was quite a powerful image and that it would convey my message very clearly.

This page shows how I intended to lay the type out for the the just text poster. Instead of having a grey background with letters cut out from red card, I decided to use blue card as the stock and use the counters from the red card.

This image shows how the type looks cut out and it also shows how the type looks using the counters from the red card card and then layered over the blue card.

To create the letters I first had to print the type onto white paper, I then traced over them using tracing paper. After this was done I transfered them to the card and cut the letters out using a scalpel.

This page shows some of the typefaces that I experimented with.

• Rockwell extra bold: This type interested me because its safiff's gave it some character, however they took up too much room and as I was working on a narrow format I decided not to use the font.

• Gill sans ultra bold: This was another font that would have been effective, however it was very smooth and I felt that this would not be powerful enough to deliver my message. Also, as I was hand rendering, the smooth lines would make it tricky to cut the letters out using a scalpel

• Impact: This is the font that i decided to use. I used it because it was bold, simple and also quite thin and tall. This typeface would fit the dimensions of the poster perfectly.

• Moudi MT condensed: This font is very similar to Impact, however the letters are not as bold and the lines appear to be smoother.

Another mandatory requirement was that the posters had to be in a 2- 1 format. This image shows how I used tiny squares of red card to create stars to give the poster some depth. It also shows the how I would also create the Earth using blue card and the land with red card.

I thought that hand rendering that posters would create a capturing and bold effect. I decided to use the colours blue and red. I also grey card for the stock. This image shows how I would create the mysterious planet X.

Many artists impressions of planet X show the planet with a chilling. horned dust cloud around it.

One of the mandatory requirements of the breif was that we were only aloud to use two colours plus stock. This gave me the idea to hand render them using different types of coloured card.

This image displays each of the three disaster scenarios that are going to affect the planet. It shows videos and diagrams of crustal displacement, devastating solar flares and the effects of planet X as it moves past earth.

This image displays some of the safe havens that are going to be made. This is where the people who get selected from the lottery will go to survive the catastrophic events of 2012.

This image shows how you can enter yourself into the lottery. They make sure that every last contact detail is available to fill in to make it look as real as possible.

This page displays the eleven candidates who are up for election and the links to their individual profiles.

This page on the sight shows an election video encouraging people to vote for the person they liked best to lead the new world after 2012.

This is the I.H.C's homepage after all the complaints. Notice that at the bottom of the page there are various logos and small print linking the sight to the film.

This the Institute for Human Continuity's (I.H.C) homepage. Here it shows info on planet X, candidates who will run the new world and in the top right hand corner it shows the amount of people who have signed up for the lottery.

this is how the homepage looked before the complaints. Notice that there are no logos or text linking this sight with the film 2012.

On this page of my sketch book I have drawn the eliptical orbit of planet X and written down some information on it.

This is the first page from my sketch book. It shows some research on planet X and some facts taken from some end of the world theories.

This is the newspaper article taken from the Independent.

For this brief we were asked to buy several papers and select a headline that interested us. Upon looking at several papers I selected an article from the Independent. The headline was...

"Relax the end isn't nigh"

The article is about how the supposed end of the world predicted by the mayans in 2012 is false. The main focus in the article was about an undiscovered planet known to us as planet X or "Nibiru". This planet, according to the ancient Mayan civilization is on a strange elliptical orbit and is meant to collide with the earth on the 21st of December 2012

It tells us about a sight called the Institute for Human Continuity. This sight talks about the inevitable end of the world in 2012 and how they plan to have a lottery to save a certain amount of people. The sight mixes fact with fiction and has scared thousands of people across the globe, some of them even contemplating suicide.

The sight was created by Sony Pictures for the soon to be released film 2012, however there was nothing on the sight to suggest it was created for a movie experience and this is one of the main reasons why the sight has caused so much controversy.

We where then asked to design three high impact posters based around the article we had selected from the newspaper. We were to design one poster with image and text, another with just image and another with just text.