3.2

In the second session of week 3 we looked into De Bono's Thinking Hats. This meant thinking and directing our strategies at different types of feelings/ attitudes. This I found difficult not fully understanding the hats but I worked on it creating thumbnails for positive and formal and negative and creative ideas and stories. 
I how ever found that these drafts were not as strong as pervious ones I had been making earlier in the brief a couple weeks ago. I didnt like them as much. I had a chat with a lecturer and decided to make some of my posters less vauge and more directed at a single person or narrow the idea of each down even more but using the image and text together. I also wanted to combine some of my drafts ideas. 
I decided to take a small break from working on VCD and focus on other papers instead for a day or two as I was starting to struggle with idea generation a bit too much from all thinking and idea generation in such a small period of time. I want to take a step back and return to it later with a new outlook.

3.1

Today in class we learnt about the use of adding text into a composition to help add meaning to the poster. Neither text nore image can work alone but in unison they help send a message to the viewer.  We then worked on adding text to drafts we had already made in many various ways e.g only using one word, talking to a child, talking seriously, making a joke. 

We next working on getting ideas through random word generation e.g I got the word 'house' and made a mind map on it then tried to incorporate by poster ideas into the words somehow. Then made many thumbnails based off the map. Next I was given a picture of a bridge and told to do the same thing as I did with the word house. 

I continued to make more thumbnails out of these Ideas.

2.2

Feeling the creative vibes flowing through me, I continued to work on making many concepts of posters, some being different and others being developments from previous works. The posters were still just A4 size and poorly drawn but the ideas were communicated clearly with captions.
I then took the streets of Wellington in search of advertisements that used metaphor or 'making the familiar, unfamiliar  to take pictures of and analyse. I found the advertisements for ANZ, The Body Shop and American Tourister were the most successful few. This is because the metaphors were used effectively along with text to made a point. 

2.2

After talking with the tutors we decided it was a good idea to expand on my knowledge/ wordlist of my four focus ideas. This I did by making mind maps  I also made them very board instead of focusing on social media so that I can use them for ideas in the future and so they would help with making the familiar unfamiliar and symbols. These mind maps helped borden my view on the topics and I found it helped with my creativity which I was struggling with perviously. The in class exercise with finding uses for the whisk all helped a lot as well.

2.1

After the first session we were already coming up with ideas and drafts for our posters. I found this difficult and rushed for a couple reasons. First I felt I hadn't done enough research yet and I felt that the idea of doing a poster on just 'social media' was too board for me to come up with ideas besides just the simple poster saying social media is good. 
For homework into the next class I decided to narrow up my focus onto four different subjects within social media being:
- building communities
- freedom
- sharing ideas
- staying connected
I then came up with a couple drafts that I liked.

1.2

First we had to read up on the three topics of; voting, social media and superstores. I researched all three finding interest in social media and voting the most. I ended up deciding on social media as my topic for the next 6 weeks as I knew little about the government system and felt I couldnt get a grasp on it, even though it did interest me a lot. Social media is something I believe in strongly and wanted to work on it. 

I spent the week creating mind maps which I enjoyed making, as it helped me sort out my thoughts and process them by putting everything into categories. 
Then I went and found imagery for the next week based on my word lists and tried to focus on the positive vibes of social media while still doing research on both the positives and negatives on social media.