Benzo32

Benjamin Brown
Nmd 206
Main Project Some of the most influential aspects of life are those which don't require much thought. Sure it can be argued that your studies or choice of profession will dictate how you live your life but sometimes just a word of inspiration is enough to change the course of a week and increase your happiness as a person.
When creating an idea to try and shift the perception of people quickly and without much thought, two very obvious designs came to mind. The first were what are known as web comics, and are very popular on image sharers where users can very quickly shuffle through thousands of pictures with just simple clicks of the arrow key. Often times these comics depict something humorous or thought provoking and are created using some type of digital medium such as tablet and photoshop. Once and a while people create very detailed and well researched web comics based on things that they have found very interesting. This can be on any subject from biology to basic aspects of space travel which put into the web comic format become not only pretty to look at but also very engaging. This aspect of attention drawing where information can be quickly passed to the viewer was the first part of my initial idea.
The second portion of my design came from what I think of as the “tee-shirt template”. This can be applied to anything from bumper stickers and desktop wallpapers. The appeal of this design principle for me is the transference of fairly complex or thought provoking ideas with very simple images and few lines of text. By mixing the two aspects of tee-shirt templates and the web comic design I hope to create a group of images which can potentially improve peoples day to day lives with just a glance. In this way I created the concept of “Daily Dose”. When one looks at my images they will be provoked into quickly thinking about a subject in their life which may not be obvious. The intent is to cause someone to take a step back from their normal perception of what is going on in work and school to instead focus on something that could be more important. So far the most clever Daily Dose is a picture of an old telephone with the words “When did you last call your best friend?”. This may not sound overly complex but hopefully the simple and elegant picture of the phone make it appealing to use it as a sticker or desktop background. When people look at the picture they can not help but have the idea planted in their head to consider calling their best friend.
This will hopefully be the power of the Daily Dose, the ability to cause people to remember what is important in life as opposed to only work. Peoples quality of life is greatly improved when they are not constantly if they are able to consider what makes them happy instead of what is always required of them.
The two biggest difficulties when creating the Daily Dose were attempting to create a compelling piece of artwork for the first time on a tablet, and to give meaning to the images without beating the audience with the point. The first is fairly easy to go back and improve on especially as I continue to make images for the web site. As I create more obviously my technique will improve and the Daily Dose can become something with a great deal of followers. The second is somewhat more difficult because you have to trust the viewers to understand what they are seeing in the context of why you made the image. Hopefully this too is something that was done fairly well and the meaning behind my images is clear.