The Brief

Asked to select a focused area of your choosing from your initial module research. This will inform your decision-making and will develop into a visual display poster. This will identify a problem, issue or something that isn’t working. The goal is to raise awareness to form a call to action.

Rationale

The purpose of this project was for me to explore how graphic design can do good in the world,
set an example and promote change. It allowed me to research many areas that I found interesting, where I later discovered the adverse effects of financial borrowing. This is where my rationale of soft debt came from. My approach was to draw awareness to the negative effects by exploring creative ways to show the negative issues of buying things on finance and making each purchase a regular occurrence somewhat like a habit! I wanted to use a creative way to make people stop and think when looking at these ads. This is where I generated my own form response towards the BNPL company Klarna. In the style of their visual identity, I crafted my own response towards each design asset. This would become the foundation to which I could adapt and develop my own ad campaign against BNPL companies.

To do this, I created a fake company called Placebo, with the tagline ‘Your Wakeup Call’. This was a creative way to advertise to my audience that buying on finance can become a placebo effect. This is because of how easy it becomes and how it makes us feel, which is a quick fix. The idea of ‘Smooth Debt’ was to give context to show how easy it is now to buy things on finance. The playability aspect was to generate imagery to connote creative ways to visually show debt is being soft and not taken seriously anymore!

Resolution

The resolution was to create a visual campaign that explores each design aspect, from the choice of typography to the colour and layout considered. Designing a single poster was to grid each aspect within this campaign to visually show how it worked both via social media and in public. To give context to my audience, I included a supporting statement to share my research and thoughts in this area. The idea to provide a QR code was to give an interactive element to the poster as well as a call to action to find out more.