Task 6 - Theory Into Practice

For this task I will be looking at Garry Barker's post on Surveillance and Foucault. Garry's thoughts on stereotyping and social acceptance relate deeply to some of my design ideas. My main interest within graphic design is high end retail advertisement and is a place where stereotyping and influential ideas are used repeatedly targeting society's docile body. Garry argues that, 

          'communication supersedes sociological interpretations'.

This is something that I strongly agree with. The designer for a piece of work is in a very powerful position of influencing society. People will always be able to interpret ideas in their own way, however the designer has the power to control to a certain extent how his work is viewed and perceived through means such as market placement, colour, type etc.

Stereotyping was a key element in a project I have just completed for a YCN competition designing for Ted Baker. The main idea is the slogan 'Perfected' and presents the idea that perfection is achievable if you buy a watch from Ted Baker. In our fast paced, judgmental society stereotypes become part of everyday life and everyone wants to be seen as perfect. For the logos in Fig 1 I made a conscious decision to use very 'obvious' type faces to make the audience do as little as possible to work out which design was relating to them. The female logo is soft, decorative and pretty. Whereas the male logo is structured, strong and bold. This use of design influences the audience subconsciously, yet enables them to take on their relative persona. The Panopticon lies within the suggestion that the Ted Baker watches have a power to change you as a person. Placing stereotypical objects with the relative watches (Fig2, Fig 3) helps the customer to visualize and embody their own lifestyle and relate it with the idealistic one that Ted Baker has created. 

Garry goes on to look at Derrida's Of Grammatology focusing on how 'representation inhabits reality'. My response to this would be that with the ongoing use of idealistic advertising, advertising an 'obtainable' perfect lifestyle makes people very susceptible to believing that the ideas they see are true, especially if they are the only ideas they they are being shown.

Fig 1

Fig 2

Fig 3