Todays Meeting: Shorter, Sharper and Faster.

Today we saw Jake who liked our True and False theme but thought that we have to be sharper, faster and shorter in catching peoples attention and interest. He wanted us to think about a slogan. Maria, Amon and I discussed it afterwards and we still like the True/False theme and found it hard to come up with another slogan that goes with it but agreed with Jake when it comes to putting more drama and action into our visualizations of the stories and is thinking about slogans. I showed the corset, african secret female society and poison stories that I found earlier in the week and we decided to work on them instead of the old ones as these ones are actually true and can be connected to modern life + Jake and everyone in the group liked the stories:

Åsa  - story about the poisonous arrows with the poison that stays active up to 1300 years

Maria - ( will present her research about the tsar here on the blog later) The story about the Russian tsar who had a room with a bear into which he locked in people he didn't like to see if they would survive or not ( connected to the Tsar exhibition at V&A). A true story. And the true story about the corsett based on this research:

We thought it was funny that they thought that corsets  caused diseases as cancer, hunchback, hysteria, melancholy, abortion and epilepsy back in the days and that " they were also criticized for titillating qualities, especially when used in erotic literature"

Maria will also look into typography used for headlines for magazines as we thought today that no one would read long stories ( keep them as short and sharp as possible) on posters but we might need an slogan on the posters to make sense out of the images, example: "King Henry collects his wives heads" ( that was a bad one but u get the point, something that makes u curious, something dramatic). The type in the brochure should still be hand drawn.

Amon and Åsa - takes on King Henry who killed so many of  his wives ( Amon will present her research about King Henry here on the blog later). A true story. We liked Jakes dramatic suggestion with King Henry eating grapes by an basket filled with his wives cut of heads, bloody image. I had an suggestion of drawing King Henry having an romantic dinner with a new love victim and that u would see heads, arms n legs from the previous wife's under the dinner table.

Amon - the African female secret society based on this research:

Amon had a really nice idea of drawing these women spread out in the forest with their masks, reading vogue, watching political stuff on TV ( or something), dancing etc. Cause this secret female society was actually very modern and discussed and taught young women about politics, sexual matters, dance etc.

Amey -  ( was sick today. Amey call anyone of us if the info on the blog doesn't make sense and we'll explain) sub brand, we need a "find out at V&A" or "explore the truth at V&A" or something together with an TRUE/ FALSE logo for brochure's and postcards etc + the web banner. Work together with Amon to create the brochure. We discussed the map today. The map is 4 pages and if we want to do a real map that would be a crazy amount of work in very short time so we discussed that we should just leave simple info after every story like "floor 4, asian section" as there is hardly any time to make real maps.

We discussed the 5 outcomes and we have so far:

brochure ( Amey and Amon should talk cos Amon had some new lay out ideas for the brochure)

postcards

posters

web banner

and then the questions is, event invitation or website? We agreed on that a website reaches more people and Amon made a point that an event is maybe more PR. Either ways we still don't have any ideas for the website so we need to decided on the fifth outcome and what it should be, website or event and how it should be applied.

We discussed the timetable and decided to either print in college or find a faster way to print as we need more time to develop this and do it properly. All the images and their stories should be finished on the 27 th and we should post work on the Blog until then so that we can give each-other feedback and maybe spot if there's any mistakes before it is to late + the sooner the designers get work from the image makers and typographers the quicker they can get started . A good thing for the designers would be to make the finished lay out for postcards and the brochure in Illustrator or Photoshop so that you easily just paste in the correct text and images later. The deadline for us is moved from Thursday to Friday 30/1. After the seminar that day we should start printing our work, send it off etc.

PS. Derek said that the marketing manager of the V&A is invited to our Crit, so he might show up and view everyones work so we should really do our best :)

The next meeting will be on the 29th in college at 10 where we will see a tutor again.

Did I forget anything?

Good Luck with all the work and see you all on Tuesday!

/ Åsa