This Human Rights Day (21st of March 2013), we were given a project brief in which we were to reverse engineer the design process with our final piece being hand-made as opposed to on the computer screen.
Free and Equal is laid out in the international declaration of human rights as a basic right for all. This however is not the case with a minute percentage of the world in fact being free. Free from the economy, free from patriarchy, free from gender based violence, free from xenophobia, the list goes on. The design choice of nails to form the structure of the words is to represent the true meaning of freedom in our world, where humanity is in fact imprisoned by their own constructs. Equality is a mythical word thrown around by this minute percentage of society who have enough and live well enough that they can throw around a term they know nothing about. The multi-colour twine used to fill in the structures created by the nails represents humanity, all equal in their inequality and lack of freedom.

This is my first prototype of my design concept. While doing this I discovered various necessary changes in order to realize my original concept for the project. For example the size of the nail head needed to be bigger in order to sustain the multiple layers of twine which I intended to build the letters up from. And my typeface needed to be bolder and more angular as the nails did not allow for any real movement in the typeface itself.

This is my final design in progress. At this stage I decided to change the colour tone of the ampersand so that it stood out for symbolic reasons, to emphasize the meaning of the project. I also decided that another 5 layers of twine were necessary to create what I had originally envisioned for the letters.

This is the final design as photographed by Robynne Peatfield in the studio at Rhodes University, South Africa.