For this Visual Communication Design studio assignment ‘Ihi Wehi’ our brief was to create two posters which highlight an example of Inequality in New Zealand and create a design solution to encourage social change.
The topic I focussed on as Men’s mental health in New Zealand and wanted to highlight the current socio-cultural norm of toxic masculinity – where men have been conditioned to keep quiet and ‘mute’ about their emotions and inner thoughts to appear what society deems ‘masculine’. In 2014, the male suicide rate was three times as high as women.
I wanted to illustrate how important it is that men speak up about their struggles with mental health and how mates should communicate and check in with each other.
My concept, 'Take yourself off mute, bro!' was sparked by many random ideation and idea generator exercises in class. In one exercise we pulled random idioms/sayings from a hat and generated ideas based off the saying, I got were, “No man is an island” and “You can lead a horse to water”.
This assignment encouraged us generate and develop a range of concepts rapidly to deadlines, and each class develop the idea further based off in class critique and feedback from our tutors.
(above) Poster development
(above) final posters
