09-12/05/2023
The week started off with our Salvage Collective teams meeting, we discussed an article titled “Dead white man’s clothes” which explains how a lot of clothes that we donate to charity shops are donated to places around the world (this article focused on Accra, Ghana) where upon arrival, 40% of the clothes are in such bad condition that they are immediately sent to landfill. The landfill sites in Ghana are overflowing so much that clothes are being dumped into unofficial tips which are not only hazardous to the residents and wildlife in these areas, as well as the textile waste flowing into the ocean, they also trap a lot of methane gas which can be very dangerous if set on fire.
I decided to create my Not So Fun Fact post for this week centred around the landfill situation in Ghana, a lot of which is caused by fast fashion as the quality of these clothes are so bad, they are unwearable by the time they reach Ghana. The main image for this post, I decided was going to be a landfill pile of clothes. This was one of the more time-consuming drawings due to the details of the clothes and their shadows, as well as the different colours of clothes. I believe drawing consistently every week for the Instagram posts is improving my illustration skills, as well as drawing in a different style than I’m used to. I also believe that my graphic design skills continue to improve weekly by creating the posts, as well as learning how to design the posts to improve user experience and efficiency – for example not having overwhelming amounts of writing so that the information is snappy but focuses on the most important parts, as well as still being enjoyable to read – not bland and monotonous, like it has some personality to it.
My NSFF Landfill in Ghana post was uploaded on Wednesday and has received positive engagement! As I create more and more posts, I receive less and less feedback from Ed that requires me to change or edit my posts, which I believe shows that I’m adapting to the branding style of Salvage Collective while still bringing a new style of content to their page.
I also worked more on my personal branding. I updated my logo so now it’s more readable, as I had some feedback from family and friends that they liked it however it wasn’t obvious as to what it said. Rather than a dark green to light green ombre, it’s now a dark green to off-white ombre, so the main lettering is much easier to read. I also worked on the branding of my critical path plan, where I decided the colour palette and design for the page. I also picked the primary and secondary fonts I will be using for my personal branding.
On thursday, my focus was to complete as much of my tutorial post as possible! As it’s a post format that has multiple slides rather than one page, it consumes more time to create.
I started out by deciding the tutorial for the week – upcycling old jeans into a tote bag, and then created my rough sketch plan. I completed all of the graphic illustrations today, consisting of the main image of a denim tote bag, as well as all of the construction steps visualised, as I think this makes a tutorial a lot easier to follow.
12/05/2023
Today I finished my tutorial post by assembling all of the graphics and writing to accompany the steps on InDesign. I sent my final versions to Ed and they were uploaded that day with no changes needed! It was my first post where no changes were made after sending them to Ed for feedback! I think this is due to me getting used to what Ed’s personal preferences are but also the branding style of Salvage Collective. This small success definitely makes me feel more confident in my abilities, especially my illustration and graphics skills – which is important as these are the areas I was aiming to improve. I feel like this confidence will make me more inspired to create and to perhaps experiment a bit more within this art-style as I’m slightly concerned about the posts being too “samey”.
Comments