1Research:This project was in collaboration with Kate Aren. Kate and I began our research with lots of questions about what voting is, why is voting important, how many young people are actually voting, etc. Kate and I looked at both qualitative and quanitative data to get to a conclusion: young people think voting is boring and time consuming, their vote doesn’t matter and nothing can fix the country, and that they would rather be doing something more fun (like looking at election memes instead).
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We landed on the idea of using memes to capture the younger generation’s attention and get them excited about voting. Kate and I put our best chronically online selves to the test and came up with countless words and phrases used online. We started to juxtapose memes with voting jargon to create language that spoke to our audience.
3Mood + Tone: We collaborated on a moodboard to find the voice of this project through visuals. Something we knew we needed to include was meme imagery, but it had to be alongisde old, constitutional visuals that captured the historical + significant aspect of voting. Since our language already juxtaposed these two things, that meant our visual direction would naturally combine these two very contrasting things too.
4Making,making,making: Kate spent time creating the motion (see her storyboard process below) while I spent time creating assets to use and then designing the social media posts. We both collaborated with each other a lot, where I constantly gave Kate feedback on the motion, and her on my assets/posts. We both could not have designed these final concepts without eachother’s help and unique design perspectives. There
are dozens of my own creative decisons in the motion while there are dozens of hers in all of my design work as well.
Early idea of lockups with type exploration, icon bank, and image styles by Kate & I. Storyboard by Kate.
5Final Campaign: The final assets for this competition included a short vlog piece, motion graphic, and several social media posts. Below are a couple frames from the motion, the social media posts, and the image strategy. The color palette was provided to us by the compeition guidelines, which was a fun spin on the traditional red, white, and blue patriotic theme we see on voting campaigns far too often. We used the blue scribble as a repeating metaphor of bubbling in an actual ballot. With the use of constitutional aesthetics and internet memes, we encourage young voters to think differently about voting and actually get out to the polls to vote. Shout out to Kate’s boyfriend for the incredible voiceover on the vlog.