Finished manifesto

 

The finished manifesto that I created was made up of quotes from my previous diaries that I kept over the last decade. The quotes that I picked are all personal to me, which is what I like about this piece of work. Diaries are a personal and secret documentation therefore people can read this manifesto, yet they will not fully understand the meaning and emotion behind what I have written; hence making it a personal manifesto. The diary entries that I have used are all different - some focus around the main topics in the diaries I have kept and others are things that inspired me reading through them (such as: "You have to look after the things you got in life"). In addition some of the topics I look at are also silly but remind me of my childhood such as my declaration of my love for carwashes. When designing my finished manifesto I designed the outcome with lots of thumbnails - during this stage I realised that all the quotes I had selected to work with had words I could emphasise like a secret code (from my childhood self) to the future me. I decided to play with scale of these words to make them stand out - I found that this also played around with my personal twist on normal manifestos that often have these themes. The words that I highlighted were: "Love, wish, look and hope" I also made other parts of the text bolder and larger to emphasise a phrase within the text.  I decided to align the text so that the information in confined within in a rectangle. I used a large amount of blank space around the main body so the manifesto is not so busy furthermore it draws our eyes to the centre and to read the text. The layout is meant to show the same pattern as how a diary is read (lines.)

 

After creating the main body I had a crit and after that discussion I thought of different ways of using colour and exploring different ways of presenting the manifesto to the public. One idea we came up with, was understanding how my past self would have viewed the look of the manifesto (in the black and white form) and what would have made me attracted to the design as a child. I experimented with using my favourite colours in the background (red and purple) because this is something we would have cared about as a child (favourite colour). I also looked into the different materials that would have attracted me to the work. As a child I was very creative and would make things with art and craft therefore felts, furry textures, glittery paper and stickers would have gotten me excited over a design like this. As a child text didn't really interest me unless it was decorative and simple. I also thought about making the design into a diary cover and putting my entries behind the design (above). I really like this outcome as it is so simple but translates my whole concept very well - the manifesto is within the pages of my childhood. I thought that another interesting idea could be making the design into vinyl (smaller) and sticking the manifesto on the pages of my diaries as I used to stick stickers all over my books. Lastly I tested colours of the text also - one of my favourite outcomes was the fading effect of the words as it gets to the bottom of the manifesto which represented the memory fading and my life changing over the years. In addition it helped to determine where one quote started and ended.