I’m sorry for the lack of posts recently. I have actually been quite busy working on a number of projects and will hopefully be able to find time to collate and upload them soon once they’ve all been signed off on.
Since January, I have been very lucky in the fact that I’ve had quite a number of people wanting me to work with them to develop some fantastic campaigns, logos and websites, all of which are going really well. I’m really looking forward to some of the projects going live and getting them out there into the public.
In the meantime, please stay tuned and I’ll be posting another update very shortly.
Firstly, I hope everyone is having a good new year. Welcome to 2010. That’s “twenty ten” and not “two thousand and ten” according to the American National Association of Good Grammar (NAGG).
To kick off January, here’s a new identity for Impossibly Stupid, a blog run by Doc O’Leary. Doc writes about many things, but with a particular interest in some of the mindless things that people do that make you think “Well what was the point of that?”. Here’s his original logo:
Impossibly stupid original logo.
It’s not actually that bad of a logo, but it was lacking communication between it and the blog name.
This was a very short project, but one which still required the sketching of ideas between any digital work was done. I started by trying to incorporate the ‘i’ and ’s’ of ‘Impossibly Stupid’ into one solid logo and I think this is where a lot of logo designs start from. Some are fantastic, others don’t work at all. I also tried to play with the idea of taking one step forward and two steps back to reinforce the idea of something being stupid.
Initial ideas for Impossibly Stupid.
That wasn’t really working as well as I had hoped it would so I moved onto something else, playing with the simple equation of 1+1=3. Something so obviously wrong that everyone knows it’s wrong. It was a simple equation, but one which I felt reflected the tone of voice of Doc’s words perfectly.
I tried a number of variations of the equation, trying to design it in such a way that it looked more like a graphic, rather than numbers but I found that the message became too complex, making people look for the connection between it and the name.
Initial ideas for Impossibly Stupid.
I also tried different placements of the equation, including a vertical alternative.
Initial ideas for Impossibly Stupid.
But in the end, I came back to something much simpler – I+I=III
The final idea used for Impossibly Stupid.
Using ‘I’ instead of ‘1′ and using ‘III’ instead of ‘3′ helped the logo to stay unique and relate back to the name. With three ‘i’s in the name, it just gives a little nod, but not so much that it’s too obvious.
From the final sketch design, I then worked in Illustrator to refine it, trying different varations. The final logo:
The final logo for Impossibly Stupid.
I manually kerned the equation using VAG Rounded as a basis for the numerals. I also enlarged the plus/equals symbols and tightened up the words a little bit so that the logo as a whole wasn’t too elongated.
Doc was very happy with the final result and was kind enough to leave a permanent credit link back to my site, which I appreciate.
A quick, but enjoyable project to work on and one which had a very simple solution!
To compliment Ruby Jones’ new handmade jewellery website www.rubyandblue.com, I was hired to produce a range of gift vouchers with 5 different monetary values that customers could purchase and give as gifts for any occasion. You can see the project here.
I really enjoyed working on this project from the start as Ruby was one of those clients that there just aren’t enough of. Right at the start of the project, Ruby had already taken time to produce a detailed PDF of exactly what she wanted including links to things she liked the look of. This is really useful as a starting point for designing anything.
Upon starting the project, I already had an idea of what I had liked to try with the vouchers after Ruby had said that there were to be multiple values for each of the voucher. The first thing that came to mind was how banknotes are designed and in particular, the beautiful and intricate patterns formed by guilloches. Guilloches are the fine and complex lines that can be found on the likes of the £10 note.
Guilloches can be found on banknotes.
Guilloches can take the form of any number of mathmatical possibilities.
I had first learned about guilloches a few months ago while reading a blog post by Aegir Hallmundur of Ministry of Type. Every one has of course seen guilloches before, but how many people know that they’re called guilloches? It was really interesting to discover that they even had a name!
I presented some very rough sketches to Ruby along with some information on guilloches and she liked the idea.
A few rough voucher sketches.
A bit more searching led me to this fantastic guilloche maker by Tom Beddard of www.subblue.com and I had fun making various shapes with increasing complexity. The one thing that this was missing though was the ability to actually save the design into an editable form such as an .ai or .pdf file.
A guilloche made with a guilloche maker.
Because I couldn’t save the guilloches made into a usable format, I unfortunately had to attempt to make them manually in Illustrator instead, which meant that they would be nowhere near as complex. I tried a few different things, but nothing looked quite as good as using mathmatical processes. I had a feeling that my wish to use guilloches in the design of the gift vouchers was going to be a dead end due to being unable to find something easy (and free) to use instead.
Not willing to be too dead in the water just yet, I looked again at the various design elements of a banknote and the main thing that stood out even more than the guilloches was Bank of England, in the custom script typeface. I decided to try and incorporate this into a gift voucher design. Ruby had already said that she wanted to use “Look Amazing” to support her logo and I thought this was the perfect opportunity to do so.
Elegant swirls are used for the text on banknotes.
I began researching into some similar typefaces that might match the one used on banknotes and found one that might work quite well. What became apparent very quickly was that simply typing out “Look Amazing” and digitally adding some extra swirls wasn’t going to be enough. It didn’t look natural enough. So, I printed a few copies of “Look Amazing” and started adding the swirls manually instead.
Manually adding swirls worked better than digitally adding them.
After producing a number of these sketches, I scanned them back into Illustrator and began tracing the swirls of various revisions, before adding the final one to a voucher design that I had been working on and it looked quite fitting.
Handmade guilloches add to the voucher design.
Fine details make the voucher visually interesting.
I was quite happy with how the voucher had turned out, even though the guilloches had been made manually instead of mathmatically. Additionally, although it didn’t look exactly like a banknote, it gave just the right feeling of one. A feeling that the voucher had value.
I wanted to present Ruby with three different concepts for her to choose from. As you can see above, Ruby&Blue’s logo focuses on making the ‘&’ out of small pebbles and for the next concept, I wanted to try and bring these into the design even more.
A much simpler gift voucher which relates back to the logo.
Although not as complex as the first voucher, this one actually reflected Ruby’s site in a better way because it was a little more contemporary than the guilloche design. However, I felt that it was a little too heavy handed and that the logo in particular was overshadowed by all of the surrounding pebbles. I liked the idea of keeping the voucher clean, but I also liked the idea of incorporating guilloches somehow and so for the third concept, I wanted to try and get a mix of both things.
A marrying of the first two concepts in a more refined design.
In this design, I felt that the elements were much tighter and better reflected Ruby’s website. Although the guilloche version was visually interesting, it didn’t say the right things about Ruby’s brand, whereas I believe that this design does. Ruby agreed and we went forward with this design.
There were some small changes to the design. Because Ruby would be printing the vouchers herself, some of the finer typeface strokes would not print properly. This meant a change of typeface for something a little thicker that would print even at a tiny size.
Some of the smaller details would not print on a standard printer.
A heavier typeface allowed for printing at small sizes.
For the main occasion messages such as “I love you”, “Happy Anniversary” and “Merry Christmas”, I wanted a typeface that would make the words stand out. I considered using the same typeface that I used for “Look Amazing” in the guilloche design, but it didn’t quite work. Instead, I opted for a font called Renaissance, which has some beautiful letterforms for its capital letters.
The font "Renaissance" adds a nice elegance to the voucher.
Once the front of the voucher was finalised, it was time to design the back of it. A much easier job. On the front of the voucher, I had included some hearts made out of the same pebbles that made up the ‘&’ in the Ruby&Blue logo so I included them on the back. However, after designing it, Ruby asked for space to be made to include a message box so that customers could use the back of the voucher to write something to whoever they were giving the voucher to. The back was redesigned to accomodate this.
The voucher back uses similar elements as the front.
The addition of a large message box meant a redesign for the back of the voucher.
The last thing to be designed was an envelope, which the gift voucher would be presented in. I didn’t want to make this as complex as the voucher, but to simply give a few hints as to what was inside. Three concepts were designed for the envelope and the second was chosen.
Envelope 1 was a very simple, bearing just the logo.
Envelope 2 was the same as 1, but incorporated the same type of lines used on the voucher.
Envelope 3 used the "Look Amazing" words to support the logo.
Both Ruby and myself were happy with how the design of the voucher and the envelope had progressed. For me personally, I had really enjoyed working on the project and I thought it was quite interesting to see how one of my early sketches ended up being the framework for the final design.
One of the early sketches ended up being incorporated into the final design.
Ruby was a great client to work with and one which I ended up working with again to produce some of her site images. As Ruby has just officially launched the website, I’d like to wish her luck in her new business and hope that the gift vouchers are enjoyed by those customers wishing to purchase them.
With the Viral Man project completely finished, it was time to launch it, but not without a few changes.
Unfortunately, the symptom videos which we filmed were eventually not used as the committee thought that a lot of them weren’t as funny as intended. It’s a shame, as we thought that they really added to the project, rather than just the one interview video.
Additionally, Hannah had volunteered to dress up as Fresher’s Flu, a friend to Viral Man and together they’d infect students. We incorporated this into the script of the interview and Hannah volunteered to don some pink facepaint, pink clothes and even some pink hair extensions to become Fresher’s Flu for the day. Unfortunately, this didn’t make the cut and the committee requested that the interview video be reedited to remove references to this character.
Viral Man goes live
The Viral Man project was developed in the middle of July/August for a September launch and the committee had always intended us to be present at the student’s welcome meeting to introduce the video to them. Both Jerry and Will weren’t sure if they’d be around for the welcome meeting and Hannah didn’t want to do it by herself at one of the two campuses, but I was really keen on gauging the student’s reaction to the video, even if it meant standing in front of a few hundred people.
In preparation for the presentation, I made a very simple PDF with my name on it and some key points. Having sat through a similar welcome meeting when I was a new student, I knew that they wouldn’t want to listen to me go on and on and so my presentation would last no more than three minutes, though I had been told I had ten. I wanted to incorporate the video directly into my PDF, but unfortunately, I was told that there wouldn’t be time to give me a copy of it to do so. I was assured however that there would be AV technicians on the day to help make the presentation run smoothly.
On Sunday 20th September, I headed over to Chester and watched everyone start to gather in the large sports hall which was now home to around 700 seats. I spoke to one of the committee and she told me that the video was ready to play on disk. I just had to open it up. As I said, I was told that there would be AV guys there who would do that and so I wasn’t looking forward to having to close my presentation down, insert a disk and play it. In theory, that sounds like the easiest thing in the world, but when you’re on a stage in front of 700 students who just want to go for a drink, it’s much harder. I was also told that I would be presenting twice, as there would be two lots of 700 students to speak to. Something which no one had informed me about! This made things twice as nerve-wracking.
Once the hall was full, I realised just how daunting it was going to be to stand in front of everyone on my own. While other staff members had done this on a yearly basis, the most people I had presented to was 30 of my fellow classmates. 700 students was on another level!
It doesn't look like it, but there's 700 students here.
On stage first was the Vice-Chancellor, Tim Wheeler and then followed other important staff, some of which I’d already met. I was up last, right after Gay Rabie had spoken to students about Swine Flu.
When Gay took to the stage and delivered her presentation, the first thing I noticed was that she had used an image of Viral Man in her presentation and while this in itself wasn’t a bad thing, it made my introduction of Viral Man a little less pronounced, especially since there was no explanation as to why the image of this green man was in the presentation.
And then suddenly, out of the corner of my eye, I managed to see someone enter the sports hall. As I turned to look at them, I realised who they were. Viral Man. As someone who had been playing Viral Man for roughly two weeks of my life, it was absolutely surreal to see someone else dressed as him. Green face, the same wig I had worn, along with a stripey jumper, black pants and green gloves. And holding a green umbrella.
It was at this moment that I felt just as confused as the students sitting in the hall. I hadn’t expected him to make an appearance like this, especially before he had been properly introduced by me but because it was so unexpected, perhaps it worked.
Viral Man began walking towards the front of the hall. You could even say he was strutting, twirling his umbrella as he did so and making his way onto the stage where Gay Rabie was still speaking and coughing as loud as he could. I was bemused and so were the students. And full credit goes to the person who was playing Viral Man as he did a fantastic job.
Gay finished her presentation and suddenly I was introduced onto the stage. I could not believe how nervous I was. My hands were literally shaking. I was very thankful that I had a small script prepared for what I wanted to say and a presentation.
I said hello to everyone and explained who I was and why I was there. “And this is Viral Man”, I said to the crowd, but then had to fiddle about with a laptop to get it to play. As I said, this is usually the easier of actions, but when you’re literally shaking with nerves, it was like a lifetime waiting for the CD to load.
Finally, it played and I was able to take a 90 second breather as they watched the video. To my surprise they laughed. At the right parts. It’s a great feeling to know that something you’ve created has been enjoyed by so many people.
I would call the presentation a success for both the project and for me personally. For the project because it was a culmination of five weeks worth of work and for me personally because to speak in front of so many people was incredibly nerve-wracking. I knew I would be nervous beforehand but I still wanted to do it because what better way to overcome your fear of something than to confront it?
After the launch
Since introducing Viral Man to students, the project has been featured in numerous press articles including The Chester Chronicle, The National Student and Nursing Times. I also spent a fair amount of time regularly talking to students as Viral Man on Facebook and it was great to see him being mentioned in people’s status updates. Additionally, Viral Man was also tagged in a number of photos after students had taken some of the posters from various places just because they wanted them. I think this proves that Viral Man was indeed popular and successful.
In conclusion, my time spent on the Viral Man project was a hell of a lot of fun and resulted in a project that I’m very happy with. Given more time, I would have loved to have built a website around Viral Man to better focus all of the campaign assets such as the videos and perhaps some downloadable content. On the plus side, the Facebook profile for Viral Man proves continually popular, with more people adding him as a friend every day. My only hope is that the people responsible for updating the profile and interacting with students maintains the level of fun and quirkiness that Jerry Clark, Will Bollen, Hannah Bradshaw and myself managed to create over the course of five weeks. A fantastic project to work on.
This is the final entry in Viral Man: The Making Of. After five posts and now this, the sixth, I hope that you’ve had an insight as to what I did to get to the final stages of the Viral Man project. In this entry, I’ll be talking about the filming for Viral Man and the impact that it’s made on the University as an institution, the students and the external press. Unfortunately, as I’ve said in previous posts, I did have photos to go with this post but lost them in my hard drive crash so again, I apologise!
Viral Man goes filming
On the last Monday of work, we set about making plans for filming Viral Man’s main interview video. This two minute video would introduce people to Viral Man, while the smaller 15 second videos would show how he could be found infecting people in any manner of ways from making them cough and sneeze, to giving them aches and pains.
I was becoming quite accustomed to being dressed as Viral Man now. You could even say I was enjoying it. Although it was nothing more than facepaint and a wig, it does make you feel very different knowing that people around you are looking at you in an entirely different way.
The previous week, Jerry, Will and Hannah had spent time developing a script for me to read through while I was concentrating on designing the poster campaign. I hadn’t had much chance to rehearse it until I got to see it on Monday morning. It wasn’t actually that much script for a two minute piece of video, but because there were to be pauses and cut-aways, it easily added up.
Hannah did my makeup and I got dressed as Viral Man once more and Will set the camera up in one of the unused ‘quiet rooms’ in the library. The room, while not soundproof, is indeed quiet and made an excellent fake office.
As mentioned in my previous entry, the committee had had some reservations over the type of voice that Viral Man would have and I hadn’t really come up with a new one as of yet. It meant that I had to try and come up with a voice as we were filming. I knew that I wanted him to sound ‘husky’ and as if Viral Man himself had the flu. But at the same time, he needed attitude and even a bit of anger. Anger at the world for not loving him!
I wrote the script out on A3 pieces of paper and Hannah held them as far back as possible while I read them. The trouble was that because I wear glasses and Viral Man most certainly doesn’t, I was blind for most of the time I was reading! It meant that the script couldn’t be too far away from my eyes. Ideally of course, it would have been better to memorise the script altogether, but we just didn’t have the time.
Having gone through a few test runs, it was clear that it looked as if I was reading from a script instead of looking at an interviewer off camera. Because of this, we ended up refilming the interview the next day.
This time, I had tried to refine the voice a little more and I had the advantage of knowing the script a little better. This time, I read the script in sections, pausing to memorise the next part. I was allowed to do this because as I said earlier, we’d be cutting away from the interview to various mini videos so it didn’t matter too much if the script wasn’t read in one go.
I had a lot of fun being filmed as Viral Man. It was the first time that Viral Man had had a chance to speak. In the mini videos, Viral Man only acted, never spoke. It was fun to give him a bit more depth and allow him a point of view.
On Tuesday we also met up with some of the members of the committee and showed them a rough cut of the interview to make sure they were happy with the voice and script. It was a bit of a backwards way to do things, filming everything and then getting approval, but it was the only way we could do things quickly, as we didn’t have much time left. Thankfully, they were happy with what we were doing.
Once all of the interview filming was complete, it was then up to Jerry to put everything together in Final Cut. And so here for your viewing, is the video for Viral Man:
The next day, we did some final filming for some of the short videos outside. It was funny watching people’s reactions as they wondered why they were watching a green man doing strange things.
Later that day, to help with the transition of handing over all of the campaign assets, I wrote a campaign manual for those who would be responsible for keeping it going and a character profile for anyone who would be playing Viral Man. I think it’s really important to make sure that people understand that the character has a very specific way of acting and to go against that would go against the project.
Saying goodbye to Viral Man
Wednesday ended up being my very last day as Viral Man and in a way, I was quite disappointed! I had become accustomed to going home half green so much so that I felt comfortable enough to even take a trip to Asda in full Viral Man costume (including green face and wig) just to see what sort of expressions we’d get. It was hilarious. People looked at me as if they hadn’t quite believed what they had just seen, while others burst out laughing. There were also a few children who were either incredibly curious or incredibly scared. It was a fun experience and once which I’ll miss being a part of.
On Thursday, my penultimate day of work, I took a trip over to Chester to get some test posters printed and handed them over to the committee, along with a few copies of the campaign manual and character profile.
The Last Day
Finally, on Friday, we took delivery of 2,500 spikey balls for the project, along with 2,500 stickers. This ended up being one of the most fun days of the project, mainly because all of the more challenging stuff was now out of the way. Instead, the morning was spent removing all of the packaging from the spikey balls so that it was easier to distribute them. We also cut A4 sheets of stickers down to A6 for easier handling. While Hannah, Will did that, Jerry focused on editing the rest of the videos for a 4pm deadline. As for myself, I had very little to do now that my job as Viral Man was complete! I had designed two poster campaigns, beer mats, stickers, set up a Facebook profile and YouTube account and of course been the character of Viral Man in person. It was weird to now be struggling to find something to do.
At 4pm, we managed to get everything burnt to disks and handed everything over to the committee. It felt great to have completed a project that we were all quite proud of. To go directly from being a student of the university to staff of the university and be repsonsible for creating a campaign that would affect 15,000 students sounded like a daunting task at first and yet for the five weeks that we worked on it, it turned out to be a hell of a lot of fun and a project which I’m proud to have been a part of.
And with all of that said, I’d like you to head over to the Viral Man project page and see everything that was designed as part of the project. I’d love your thoughts on it. You can also become a friend of Viral Man on Facebook at www.facebook.com/viralman.
Thank you for reading these posts and I hope that you’ve enjoyed them. It’s been useful for me to write them as well, as it’s great to look back over what I’ve done. There will be one more entry about Viral Man and this will be to do with presenting it to a total of 1,500 students – on my own!
In the last entry, I wrote about how we had developed the campaign to the point where we were now in the studio, taking photos in preparation for the poster campaign. Unfortunately, having looked at them over the following weekend, I decided that they weren’t good enough to use and so on the following Monday, we went back to the studio.
Photoshoot Number 2
On our first trip to the studio, we had to set up ourselves and as I’ve already written, I’m not a photographer. We struggled along and did take some shots that were adequate, but none that stood out. Luckily on the second visit, we managed to find Mike Pumford, Kingsway’s technician who generously took a moment of his time to help us out and set the equipment up correctly and we started taking much better shots.
A few unaltered photos from our second photoshoot.
A few unaltered photos from our second photoshoot.
A few unaltered photos from our second photoshoot.
As you can see, these images proved to be much more professional, even at an unedited stage. We ended up taking a lot of photos. Some good, some bad. But there were quite a number of them that stood out.
A few unaltered photos from our second photoshoot.
A few unaltered photos from our second photoshoot.
In order to get people to pay attention to the posters, I felt that some tight closeups of his face were important. His costume was secondary. His green, over-exaggerated face was what would attract people to look at and read the posters.
Making Viral Man larger than life
The next day, I began sifting through all of the photos we had taken. With three photos picked out, I set to work on making him larger than life. It was important that the character only resembled a normal person, rather than simply looking like a person with green facepaint. So, in order to do this, I started exaggerating his eyes to the point where there was no doubt that these eyes could never belong to a normal human being.
A digital makeup check and an exaggeration of the eyes.
I started by performing a digital makeup check on the eyes, improving the coverage of the facepaint on the eyelids to the point where they looked much more naturally blended. Also, I have brown eyes and they looked out of place on such a green character so I changed the colour of them. Finally, I exaggerated the entire area of the eye to much larger proportions. Of course, the beauty of Photoshop is that you can do these modifications seamlessly and it did the trick. I also increased the size of the character’s nose and mouth, and did the same makeup checks on the lips, while digitally pulling the sides of the mouth up a little to make it look as if the character was grinning more than humanly possible.
A much less human grin.
The Logo
As I showed in an earlier entry, I wanted the character to have a logo of some sort. Something that would tie all of the various elements of the campaign together and I knew roughly what it should look like:
A logo to tie all elements of the campaign together.
Now that we had taken lots of photos, I had something to reference. It was important that it wasn’t just a generic silhouette like in my above sketch but adequately referenced the character. And of course the thing that stands out most about the character besides the fact that he’s green, is his hair. And so this is what I came up with:
You’ll notice that it says Viral Man, not Touching Man, as I’ve been referring to throughout these entries. And I’ll get onto that in a moment.
After designing the logo and writing the copy for the posters, I was very happy with how they looked. And here they are:
All three posters.
You can view larger versions in the project area, which will be going live within a week of this post.
The presentation
After four weeks of working on this project, surprisingly, we had still yet to actually show anything to the committee responsible for giving it the green light. We had wanted to keep it secret until a point at which we could properly present it i.e. The above posters and photoshoots.
On Wednesday, I spent the day designing a screen-based presentation which I was to deliver the next morning to introduce the committee to what we had so far. I travelled to Chester for an 8am start and set the presentation up in the meeting room. At 8:30am, everyone arrived and the reveal took place. I had designed the presentation to slowly describe why the character looked the way he looked by cropping various photos of him, starting at his green shoes and working all the way up to his face. At the final reveal of his face, everyone seemed to like it.
In addition to the reveal Touching Man’s face, I had also been practicing my voice for the character and recorded a basic example script so that the committee could get an understanding of how he would sound in videos. Have a listen.
Unfortunately, there were concerns about the voice sounding too much like a speech difficulty and because it was a university-produced campaign, they didn’t want to offend anyone. This was understandable and the voice was scrapped for something more recognisable and normal.
Overall however, everyone was really pleased with how the campaign had been developed so far and were looking forward to seeing the finalised videos.
One of the things that came up in the meeting was the creation of the website. I hadn’t been looking forward to designing the site as there wasn’t much time to do create it and a Flash website takes time. Luckily however, the c0mmittee expressed their interest in using social networking instead of a website because they were worried about maintaining the site. It meant that we could focus on building the Facebook profile and more time to film the videos.
One final thing that the committee asked for was a second poster campaign that ran with the government’s national campaign’s slogan of “Catch it, Kill it, Bin it”. This meant another trip to the studio on the same day, where Hannah and I spent the afternoon taking more photos.
Photoshoot number 3
Just before we went to the studio, we spent an hour looking for props to use in the three new posters, showing how the character could be caught, killed and binned. That meant buying a net, anti-bacterial gel and a large bin. Quite a strange shopping list.
The photoshoots are fun, but quite tiring. It’s much more than a case of just taking three photos and that’s it. It’s getting the right photo, with the right focus, lighting etc. And this takes a hell of a long time to do. We spent a long time getting shots to look right.
A friend came to help/watch us take more photos in the studio and literally provided a helping hand to hold some anti-bacterial gel to look as if he was killing me with it. I also took some shots of his arm on its own so that I could play around with it in Photoshop and add it to a photo of myself.
At the end of the day, we came away with nearly 300 photos. That night I started to develop the photos into posters.
The name change
The next day, I recieved a priority email alerting us to the fact that the committee had changed their mind about the name “Touching Man” as they felt it had too many negative connotations, especially for a university-led campaign. Instead, they asked if they could use “Viral Man”. This change came after I had already designed the posters, logo and set up the Facebook profile. Admittedly, the four of us responsible for running with the name (And telling the committee about it at an early stage) weren’t happy with the name change and I tried my best to persuade them to keep “Touching Man”. It wasn’t to be though and “Viral Man” was chosen as the new name.
In retrospect, it’s completely understandable. I think that because we had been working on it on our own for four weeks, we had become quite accustomed to the name, regardless of if it was suitable enough for the project. While “Viral Man” is a little more tame and obvious, “Touching Man” does indeed bring too many negative connotations and the name change was justified. And so Viral Man was born.
I made the required changes to the posters and logo and set up another Facebook profile, this time in the name of Viral Man. Luckily, the 2,500 stickers which had been designed for the campaign had not been printed yet and they needed to be changed to reflect the change of Facebook profile address.
And so the penultimate week was over and there were now two poster campaigns, a Facebook profile, stickers, a logo and a countless number of photos that had been taken over the course of three photoshoots. Next week would be all about filming and finally, signing, sealing and delivering the whole campaign to the university in preparation for its launch just a few weeks later.
In the final entry: Two days of filming, an interview with Viral Man and taking delivery of 2,500 spikey balls.
With a clear idea of what our Swine Flu campaign would involve, Touching Man was well on his way to becoming a reality. In the last entry, I wrote about how we had developed a few ideas for what he should look like. In this entry, Touching Man finally makes an appearance. Unfortunately, a lot of the photos that I had for this entry were deleted when I lost a significant amount of my hard drive a few weeks ago and so it’s not as populated with photos as it should be. I apologise for this!
Making Touching Man’s costume
At the end of the previous week, I had spent an hour or two searching online for a stripey green and black jumper or tshirt for Touching Man’s costumes. It’s surprisingly hard to find that combination of colours. Green and white, no problem. Green and black, impossible. Luckily however, eBay came to our rescue and I placed an order for this jumper, which was exactly what I had imagined his top should look like.
We also had to consider what the bottom half of Touching Man should look like. It couldn’t take away from the main focus of his stripey top and with that in mind, we decided on some black jeans and for his shoes, some green flat shoes.
Also at the end of last week, we had purchased some long, neon green tubes for Touching Man’s spikes. They would be cut to size and slotted into the back of the jumper. However, because the jumper cost nearly £20, we didn’t want to go to the trouble of cutting it up only for it to not work and so we decided to buy a cheap £3 tshirt to test it on first.
To make our spikes, we began by cutting them down to 10cm tall. To keep them secure once in the back of the tshirt, we used some thick, sticky paper to place on the inside of the tshirt, before cutting a hole through it and the tshirt, making a slit for the spike, which held it in place quite well.
In addition to the spikes, we had also bought a pack of pegs which we then spraypainted green. We experimented with using the pegs instead of the larger, plastic tubes for spikes and found that the plastic tubes were far more visually appealing than smaller pegs and so we scrapped the pegs altogether. As I said at the beginning of this post, I did have lots of photos of the development process which were unfortunately corrupted when I lost a lot of my data a few weeks ago.
Since it was to be me who would be dressing up as Touching Man, I put the tshirt on and walked around while the spikes were in the back, seeing if they would stay securely in place. For the most part they did, which was good news. For the most part, we had succeed in developing most of Touching Man’s costume. There was one last thing we had to find: A wig.
The Wig
I personally didn’t have any set ideas about what Touching Man’s wig should look like nor did I quite know where we might find one. Luckily, Will and Jerry did and we went searching. Most of the wigs were quite normal and just not flamboyant enough to Touching Man’s personality and then Will spotted the most flamboyant wig we had seen. Wild, blonde with subtle green streaks. Admittedly (and in retrospect wrongly!) I wasn’t very keen on the wig. I didn’t think it was the right choice, but I didn’t know what the right choice was. I was hesitant about buying it but I reluctantly did so in the hope that perhaps it would look ok once it was with the rest of the costume.
The Makeup
On Tuesday, the jumper came and it was spiked-up in a similar way to the tshirt. On Wednesday, it was time to finally try the makeup on along with the costume. I wasn’t looking forward to trying it as I knew that it may be difficult to get off.
Me, Hannah and Will found a quiet room and while they waited outside, I changed into my black jeans, green shoes and stripey top, before coming back in to begin the facepainting, with Hannah taking charge of the small white pad and filling it with green makeup and then applying it to my face. 20 minutes later, my whole face was green. It was surreal to see myself no longer skin-coloured.
I then put the wig on and all of us agreed that the costume, wig and facepaint were a perfect choice. My earlier apprehensions about the wig were now gone, after seeing myself in a few photos that we took at the time. Again, I do apologise but I no longer have them.
I only had the makeup on for 15 minutes as it was only to do a ’screen test’ of sorts. Getting it off proved to be much harder than putting it on, with both Will and Hannah using plenty of facewipes to get rid of the excess, leaving me a strange shade of orange. In order to get the rest off, I retreated to the toilets, going via the library reception and greeted with some understandably strange looks. Once in the toilets, I spent a good ten or fifteen minutes trying to get my face back to its original colour but didn’t actually succeed. In the end, I got as much as I could off and then the rest in the shower once at home.
Filming
The next day, it was time to begin the filming of our short videos. We had already organised some of the storyboards and this helped us to map out our filming schedule for the day. Again, Hannah took on her makeup assistant role and turned me green and then for the rest of the day, we filmed. It was a really fun experience filming although frustrating as well. Although we had done our best to make sure that the spikes were secure in the back of the jumper, because I was moving around so much, they kept falling out while filming. It meant having to cut and redo the scene, adding time onto the filming and we were already under a very tight schedule. This was in addition to Will and Jerry going down to London later on in the day for a week and so no further filming could be done until they were back.
By the end of the day, we had managed to get roughly 60% of the videos completed, with the rest needing to be completed when Will and Jerry were back.
Touching Man’s First Photoshoot
On Friday, Hannah and I travelled from Chester’s Warrington campus to Kingsway, the university’s dedicated arts campus. Warrington campus unfortunately did not have its own photography studio and because we needed to produce a poster campaign, it was important that the photos looked professional. Neither myself or Hannah are trained photographers so it proved difficult to set up some good shots, but we perservered.
Some of the unmodified photos we took.
Some of the unmodified photos we took.
Some of the unmodified photos we took.
Some of the photos, as you can see from above are a little dark because we didn’t get the settings or lighting as good as it should have been. In other cases though, as with the third photo above, although it’s not white, it does create a nice background and this particular image ending up being internally used to promote the campaign.
Some of the unmodified photos we took.
Some of the unmodified photos we took.
Some of the unmodified photos we took.
As you can see from the above three photos, the studio isn’t particularly huge, but when the photo is cropped to the bounds of the background paper, the photo suddenly feels much bigger.
In the second of the three photos above, you’ll see that I’m hiding behind the paper. One of the assets that we wanted to design for the campaign was desktop wallpaper, which would be placed on all of the library computers. However, I didn’t want Touching Man to dominate the wallpaper but instead simply ‘infect’ it by occupying a small, but noticable space on it. You’ll see what I mean a little more clearly when I make the project live with all of its assets.
Touching Man is Touching Man not because I personally play the character but rather, because he has a very defined personality and appearance including expressions. Take this shot for example:
The character loses all personality when he doesn't smile.
This is one of the test photos where I’m not posing. Notice how with a lack of emotion, all the fun of the character disappears. It was important to retain this crazy, manic look in all of the photos. And retaining such an expression over the course of a five hour photoshoot is quite tiring!
As I had found out already, taking the makeup off proved to be a very timeconsuming process. In fact, although we finished the photoshoot at around 6:30pm, it wasn’t until 7pm that I felt comfortable enough to jump on a train home with the least amount of makeup left on me!
In total, Hannah and I took just under 100 photos. We both kept a copy and over the weekend, I began to see if I could get them to work in a poster campaign. However, as already mentioned, many of the photos that we took weren’t good enough to use and because of this, I decided that a second photoshoot was necessary.
This week had been quite productive and a lot of fun. We had developed Touching Man’s costume, shot some of our short videos and had a photoshoot. Next week would be the penultimate week of our project and it would be a big one.
In the next entry: Two more photoshoots, the unveiling of Touching Man and…a name change?
In the previous Making Of entry, I wrote about how we had come to rest on our chosen Swine Flu campaign – Touching Man. You’ll notice that I keep calling the campaign “Touching Man” and not “Viral Man”. There’s a reason for this, which will be explained further on. In this entry, I’ll be writing about our efforts to come up with a unique look for the character and how he’d appear in videos.
Mini videos
Through our research in the first week of the project, we discovered that there were seven or eight main symptoms for Swine Flu and we wanted people to see Touching Man giving his victims these symptoms as separate videos. So, we wanted a video for sneezing, one for coughing, headaches, tiredness and others. However, because the campaign was about defeating Touching Man, these videos on their own wouldn’t work. It would look like he was winning. To counterbalance we decided that an identical set of videos would be filmed but with a twist – The ending would be different to each one. Essentially, video A would show Touching Man winning, while video B would show him losing.
Storyboards for the short adverts.
My drawing skills aren’t the best, as you can see above, but Monday was spent developing a range of storyboards for all 12-14 videos that we wanted to produce. Because these would be in the style of adverts, we knew that they wouldn’t be more than 15 seconds long, which meant that we had to think of something suitable and funny that could be conveyed to the viewer in a small amount of time. Not only that, but we then had to think of an alternate ending for each one. Some of the videos proved difficult to think of endings for, while others seemed to make complete sense.
The frustrations of Flash
In addition to the videos, the committee had expressed their interest in developing a screensaver which could then be used on all University computers. We were really interested in doing this too but our downfall was that out of all four of us, none of us knew an extensive amount of ActionScript for Flash. Without this knowledge, the task of building a screensaver proved frustrating to say that least.
What we wanted was quite simple in theory. We wanted multiple spikey virus balls to continuously bounce off the edge of the screen and each other. We wanted to be able to set the speed, size and collision detection on each of the balls.
Because none of us knew much about ActionScript, we had to rely on finding and cannibalising various scripts found online, but none did quite as we wanted. Having no real experience with ActionScript, it proved to be a serious challenge. At times, we got close to a solution, but it just wasn’t quite polished enough to work. After two days of trying, I felt that it wasn’t worth carrying on and had to unfortunately scrap the idea.
The website
Part of the Touching Man campaign included a website to house all of the supporting elements such as a poster campaign and somewhere to house the short videos that we’d be filming. This would not only take up a lot of time on the project, but the responsibility of designing and coding it would have to fall to one person and one person only because it would be quite hard to work collaboratively on a site that was constantly being updated at two ends. I had already volunteered to take on the responsibility of designing the site and had also started a few sketches of what the site could look like.
Possible website to house all assets.
My Flash skills aren’t fantastic, as already described, but I knew that in order to attract people to it and actually use it, the site must be built in Flash. It needed lots of transitions and animation to help immerse the user in Touching Man’s world. However, because we didn’t actually have any content for the site yet, it meant that we couldn’t even start work on it until the last few days.
Speaking with the Archbishop of York, John Sentamu.
On July 30th, we stopped work on the campaign to help out with welcoming the Archbishop of York, John Sentamu to the university to open a new building. I’ve already written about that particular day here so I won’t write about it again, only to say that it was a pleasure meeting him as he was a really nice man.
Turning the spikey balls into a reality
From the outset of the campaign, we were really keen to have something physical that we could give to new students that would remind them about the campaign. Because the Swine Flu virus is shaped like a sphere with spikes, we thought this would make a great toy or keychain. We began to research into companies who offered anything along the lines of what we wanted, going so far as to open up real time conversations with suppliers in China via Alibaba. There were one or two companies that said they had what we needed, but because of the language barrier, I didn’t feel confident enough to place an order with them.
Instead, earlier research had found an American company that stocked exactly what we needed. Rhode Island Novelty offered a set of eight different coloured spikey ball keychains and after a few emails back and forth, we managed to work out a great bulk price for 2,500 of them – the number of new students that would be joining the university. They proved to be really helpful in supplying us what we wanted. The order was placed and would arrive within a few days, all the way from America. I do wonder if they’d had such a large order for keychains before!
Touching Man’s costume
The last thing we sorted out for the week was what Touching Man would be wearing for his costume. We had decided that he would definitely need some sort of spikes and that he would definitely be green. I personally had envisaged him with some sort of shell on his back and was really curious to see if we could find something that would fit that vision. So, with that in mind, we took a trip to the local Homebase!
We visited a number of shops including a gardening store, pet store and a general convenience store to find anything we could use to make the costume. In particular, we were looking for things to attach spikes to and indeed things to make spikes from.
A few examples of spikey textures.
Our chosen spikes.
Above are just some of the things that we found. We had already set ourselves a budget of less than £100 to buy everything we needed for the costume (though we had a budget of three times that) and so using every day items and colourful toys like above proved to be a good cost-saving idea. Similarly, we also looked at these items too:
A possible shell for Touching Man's back.
A possible shell for Touching Man's back.
More ideas for Touching Man's spikes.
Interesting floor graphics.
Although I was quite intent on buying some sort of shell for Touching Man, most of the stuff that we found was either too heavy or simply not usable. Additionally, both Will and Jerry said that they didn’t feel a shell was necessary. After a lot of persuasion, I sided with them and decided against the shell idea, but we picked up 12 of the long, green, neon sticks that you can see above. It was quite funny taking them to the counter. I don’t think people buy these things in bulk.
In addition to the above things, we also took a trip to Hobbycraft to buy some green facepaint, pegs, spraypaint (to paint the pegs), green felt and lots of other green things in general. In just a few days, Touching Man would be making his first appearance…
In the next entry: The birth of Touching Man and his first public appearances.
In the last post, I wrote about how our design team was formed and how we had spent two days brainstorming ideas for our first presentation the following Thursday. In this post, I want to tell you about how we arrived at the Viral Man idea.
One of the good things about writing about how Viral Man was formed is that over the course of the 5 weeks, I took some time to fill in a daily activity report. It gave a brief overview of what the team had done that day. It’s amazing how much information you can forget if you don’t write it down!
Fleshing out ideas
Having had a very short week the week before because we started on a Thursday, we had a lot to do before the coming Thursday. Although we had written down lots of great ideas, we still didn’t have an overall plan for how each of these ideas would be tied together. They didn’t have much of a theme running through them. In order to present something to the committee of people responsible for approving the project, I felt it was necessary to narrow the ideas down to three completely different campaigns. In order to do this, I decided to fall back on something which I swore I would never use again once I had finished university – an Initial Response Map (IRM).
A few more ideas.
An Initial Response Map as it suggests, is a designer’s initial ‘reply’ to the brief that they’ve been given. It shows that they understand what has been asked of them, that they have done initial research into the problem and ideally, show that they have enough information to present the client with three different ideas which can then be taken forward. There’s nothing stopping two ideas being mixed together, but presenting all three to a client is important so that they client can then choose how to proceed. An IRM shows the client that the designer is competent and on the same level.
I had grown to hate IRMs because I always felt that they weren’t as useful as promoted in university. I felt that there was too much emphasis on gathering research, rather than focusing on any ideas that I already had. Whether this is actually true or not, it’s how I felt at the time. However, with a presentation due in four days time, I decided to fall back on it.
Over the course of Monday, Hannah, Jerry, Will and myself sifted through the many ideas that we had and came up with three strong themes that had potential. They were:
Quarantine
Touching Man
Pick-up Lines
Quarantine: A brief overview
This campaign centred around inviting students to be a part of the campaign via social networking, a website and a print campaign. “Quarantine” focused on a fictional student diagnosed with Swine Flu, who had been locked in their room by their friends to prevent him from infecting everyone else. On a special flash-based website, visitors could see the trapped student via CCTV which his friends had installed to monitor his condition. Users would be able to click various things around the room and have the student interact with them.
This idea was influenced by the likes of Subservient Chicken, which allows users to type in a command and watch as a man in a chicken suit does as they ask.
In addition to the website, the campaign would be supported by a poster campaign, inviting users to visit the site and help the student escape. In addition to the poster campaign, special post-it notes would be stuck around campus with unique codes. When a user enters a code into the website, the student does something new. The post-it note idea came about via my own post-it note project which proved successful.
Touching Man: A brief overview
Touching Man centred around a real life characterisation of Swine Flu. By turning Swine Flu into a real, live person, it would give Swine Flu a voice and its own personality. Touching Man would take pleasure from infecting people with Swine Flu by simply touching them. The public would not be able to see him as he crept about, but would exhibit symptoms of Swine Flu right after Touching Man had touched them.
The campaign would be supported by a website and poster campaign, along with a social networking presence on Facebook.
This idea was influenced by The Wind, a fantastic film made for Epuron, a German energy company. It works because you instantly feel some sort of human connection with the character, even though the character is portraying something which has no human qualities.
Pick-Up Lines: A brief overview
This campaign was all about tongue-in-cheek innunendo and put the focus on getting students to use preventative measures against germs such as tissues and anti-bacterial gel. With phrases such as “She blew me!” and “He dumped me!” and with images of tissues, we felt that we could give a sexual connotation to something that had none at all and by doing so, create a cheeky campaign.
Supporting this campaign would be a website, designed in the style of a personals column, with adverts such as “I want you to blow me”, only for the user to click on the advert and be presented with a tissue. Additionally, this campaign called for short videos to be filmed where tissues and gels and other preventative measures would be interviewed, giving a voice to something which would otherwise not have one.
On Wednesday, the day before the presentation, I began to write up a small booklet that held all of our research so far, a brief overview of the above ideas and anything else that we felt was necessary to present to the committee. This included the provision to have some sort of themed student union bar night where students would be able to buy cheaper drinks if they came in clean or dirty fancy dress i.e. french maid for clean or binman or dirty.
Possible events for the bar
On Thursday, all four of us attended a committee meeting at 8:30am. Most of the meeting was taken up by the committes responsibilities to the university but an hour into the meeting, we had a chance to discuss our ideas.
Jayne Dodgson introduced the four of us to the rest of the committee and I handed out the booklet that I had produced with the ideas and research in, guiding them through each idea and their merits. Each idea got a few laughs and approval, with plenty of comments on each idea, which was great. It felt good to have come up with ideas that were being received well by those who would be approving it.
After discussing each idea, I asked if they could make a decision on which idea they wanted to move forward with and again, we went through the merits and disadvantages of each one. The Quarantine idea was rejected because although it was a great way to get students involved, the committee were fearful that it was too much work to take on within the timeframe. Additionally, they thought that the information may be too specific and at the time, thought that Swine Flu may change into something different in the coming months and anything that we filmed or designed might be too specific for the here and now.
The Pick-up Lines idea was received really well for its cheekyness, but partially rejected because the committee thought it may be a bit too risky, especially in the first few weeks of the new term. While the committee liked the idea, they were concerned that it might promote the wrong message about the university.
And so the strongest idea, Touching Man, was settled on. From the very start, we had been really focused on this idea. It just seemed to shout out to us and so we were quite pleased that it had been chosen by the committee. We left in a positive mood and spent the rest of the day looking around the various campuses to see if there was anything special we could do for the project in certain places.
Designing Touching Man
The next day, we set to work on coming up with ideas for what Touching Man should look like. It was very important that we get this right, because the character would literally be the face of the campaign. His appearance would tie all of the campaign’s assets together.
I already had an idea of what I wanted him to look like and the main thing was green. Green face, green clothes. Green. For me, there is no colour that better communicates “virus” than green. However, there were also other ideas to consider. These included Will’s idea of a character similar in appearance to the Angel character Lorne. A classy, well dressed character marred by green spikes coming through his suit and with a green face to go with them.
My idea built upon the use of spikes, but gave the character more of a bug-like personality, with a spike-covered shell on his back, stripy green top, green underwear on top of his skinny jeans and some antennae to go with it.
The third idea was courtesy of Hannah, who wanted him to be a very classy gentleman, wearing a tuxedo and bowler hat and a handlebar moustache.
Potential costumes for the character.
The importance of green was emphasised by Will’s idea and my own, while the spikes in both of our ideas related back to what a Swine Flu molecule looks like. Because we didn’t have much of a budget to actually buy different costume parts, we decided that my idea was the easiest to accquire and still stay under budget.
And so by the end of the full first week of the project, we had now gotten to the stage where we had picked our campaign and how Touching Man should look. It had been a slow week getting to this stage, but now that were all focused on one idea, we could start to flesh out what we would be doing for it. Touching Man was taking shape.
In the next entry: Developing storyboards for a range of videos, a visit by the Archbishop of York and a trip to…a gardening store.
Because of my unfortunate hard drive failure a few weeks ago, I lost a lot of the photos I had taken of everything that I had designed for the University of Chester last month. I had planned to upload everything to my portfolio on the same day that the campaign was launched at the University but because I didn’t have it all, I decided to hold off. Instead, I’m waiting for them to send me some of the assets that I designed so I can take more photos of them.
In the meantime however, I thought it might be a good idea to give you a walkthrough of how I, along with three other people came up with the campaign that is now on show to over 15,000 students over two main campuses and multiple university-owned premises. I plan to write about five of these “Making Of” posts in the run up to posting the work in my portfolio. It basically gives me a chance to source some photos of what I need, while keeping my blog updated.
So, in this first entry, I’d like to start by telling you how I became part of the project and what happened in the first week. I’ll try not to make it too long winded, but also interesting enough to read! The first part doesn’t have any nice visuals to go with it I’m afraid, but it at least gives you an idea of how the job came about.
Part 1 – The Making Of The Team
At the beginning of July, I wrote about how I went down to London to display my work at the D&AD’s New Blood event. It was a great experience although it could be argued that in terms of finding work via it, it wasn’t as useful. I don’t regret doing it, because it was a fantastic experience.
Prior to exhibiting, we had been told that it wouldn’t just be the graphic design department that would representing the University of Chester, but also the advertising department, who had been nominated for a D&AD award. It was a coincidence that two of the advertising students who were exhibiting happened to be staying at the same hotel as a few of us graphic designers, which allowed us to get to know each other a little better. In addition, Kate Sillitoe, one of my second year tutors was now responsible for teaching advertising and so again, there was a little bit of a crossover.
At the end of the three days of exhibiting, me and the other seven people who had also exhibited started to pack up. Kate pulled me and few others aside to tell us about a job opportunity at the university over summer. She said that the university was keen to get an early start on protecting and preventing people from getting Swine Flu and to do that, they were really interesting in hiring students to come up with a campaign that would appeal directly to students. The job would be full time for four weeks and would take place from the middle of July to the middle of August and would take place at the university’s second, smaller Warrington campus, rather than the larger, main campus at Chester.
I didn’t have any other responsibilities lined up after the exhibition and so I was keen to find out more information about the job, as was one of my classmates, Hannah Bradshaw and the two guys from advertising, Jerry Clark and Will Bollen. I gave Kate my contact details and she said that she’d be in touch.
Getting the job
After a few emails back and forward from Kate, I was told that I would be called by communications director of the university, Jayne Dodgson. I waited eagerly for the phonecall. At the same time, I was speaking to Hannah who was also waiting for the same call. We didn’t quite know how many people had shown interest in the job or what sort of questions we’d be asked.
When the phonecall did come, I was told that I was on speakerphone to two people. Over the course of 20 minutes, they asked what I could bring to the team and what sort of things I thought could be pushed forward to deliver a successful campaign. As I said, I didn’t quite know what questions were going to be asked so I did feel like I was put on the spot for a number of them, but at the same time, felt confident in my answers. At the end of twenty minutes, they thanked me for my time and said they’d be in touch. A few minutes later, Hannah got the same call and again, they said they’d be in touch. It wasn’t until the next day that we were told that we had successfully got the job and that we started a few days later.
First day
My first day was a Thursday and I had to be there for 9am. Kate said that she would be meeting us and that we’d be attending a Swine Flu briefing. I had only ever been to Warrington twice before and both times were from Chester, rather than Liverpool. I had spent the night before finding out train times and realising that it would take me 90 minutes to get there and indeed 90 minutes back as well. A long time, but I thought it’d be worthwhile as I’d still be paid more than I was spending and perhaps moreso, I would have an excellent piece of work to add to my portfolio.
Hannah and I met each other at the campus and then made our way to where we were meeting. It was there that we met Jerry, Will and Kate. After some quick introductions, we headed over to the Swine Flu briefing where we met everyone else, including Jayne Dodgson who we would be reporting to over the next few weeks. The next hour was spent taking notes from Gay Rabie, the university’s senior health advisor. All four of us made lots of notes on her presentation in the hopes that it would help our project further down the line.
After that and for the rest of the day, me, Hannah, Jerry and Will took some time to get to know each other and get a feeling for what skills we could bring to the team and we started jotting down all of the potential ideas we had each been cooking up by ourselves over the previous week. Many of the ideas, naturally, included pigs in some way or another, but we all dismissed anything pig-related fairly early on because it would send the wrong message. Still, it was important to get those ideas out on paper to see how they could possibly be modified to work.
How many pigs can you think of?
A few ideas
Some of the more interesting ideas that we came up with were the use of ‘Pick up lines’ such as “I want to blow you” and “He dumped me!”, both referring to the use of tissues. We thought these were cheeky enough to be appealing to students, while not being too offensive to use throughout the campuses. Another idea which I had was to use a poster campaign of people looking like they’re having an orgasm, but it’s actually a sneeze. There were some great ideas very early on from all four of us.
Swine Flu under a microscope.
An illustrative look at Swine Flu. Image via: http://www.flickr.com/photos/28889807@N05/3689142069/
On Friday, we continued with further research into what the virus actually looks like to see if we could incorporate that into anything. We found that the virus was quite spikey in nature when looked at from an illustrative point of view. With this in mind, we thought it’d be a fantastic idea to incorporate this shape into some sort of physical spikey ball that could then be given to all students as an induction gift.
Our first two days of working on the project had proved to be quite productive, as we were putting together some good ideas after just two days.
In the next entry: Choosing our final ideas and presenting them
You’ll notice that it says Viral Man, not Touching Man, as I’ve been referring to throughout these entries. And I’ll get onto that in a moment.
