Critical writing: Essay structure/plan 2

Taking the bits of the essay draft that worked well and then structuring it to flow much better this plan shows the gathering of information that will be expanded on in each of the paragraphs.

Graphic design is believed to have influenced political changes in the UK during the 21^st century, as ‘we assign graphic design, like all forms of communication, cultural significance because it appears everywhere’.

Visual communication is used by political parties to effectively spread the policies, opinions and messages to members of society in the hope to gain a vote in their favour. One of the main influential factors of Graphic Design and political changes within the UK is the ability for each party to build a strong visual identity that can instantly recognised by more than just the target audience. Visual communication methods such as typography, colour, illustration, photography and advertising are all used by each party and applied in a consistent way through the whole campaign to ensure a strong visual identity and ‘cultural significance because it appears everywhere.’ Graphic designers document each of these methods in branding guidelines, enabling a consistent application to all visual outcomes used by the parties.

Colour

Alina Wheeler says that ‘design is intelligence made visible’ (2006), effectively communicating with elements such as colours, shapes, layouts, scales to ensure messages reach target audiences. Graphic design has allowed for political parties in the 21^st Century to establish visually consistent branding and effective methods of visually communicating policies with ‘cultural significance’ throughout society. A very dominant focus is colour, representing each party with one main colour to ensure that associations can be made when anything is published, ‘appear[ing] everywhere’ in a number of different ways. 

There are large amounts of studies on colour influence by the likes of Goethe (1810) who focused on the experience of colour in his Zur farbenlehre, Sir Isaac Newton’s whose rational approach looked at the separation of light into a spectrum when passed through a prism, and also Max Lüscher’s (1999) best known research into colour psychology based on the reactions to different coloured cards, have all shown that as individuals we respond differently dependent on a number of factors. Although graphic design can be shown to influence political changes, there are also other factors such as an individual’s cultural upbringing, personal interests that also play a part in political opinions and followings within society. Rather than colour influencing the political followings of individuals, it is predominately used by political parties to build established identities that can then lead to a number of effective associations within the campaigning procedure.

• -       Red within the political world is the colour with the most association and historical relevance
• -       Communism
• -       Appropriate colour choice for the Labour party
• -       Representing the blood of the workers who died in the struggle against capitalism
• -       Historical relevance has meant that the colour red is now almost instantly identified to be in association to the Labour party

Emotions

-       Fear, guilt and scarcity

Advertising

Visual communication of the 21^st Century has proven advertising to be a powerful method to capture the attention of a wider target audience than just a simple list of policies for instance. The UKIP ‘No border. No control’ advertisement

- ‘This is in my view the most powerful image of the entire European election campaign. It is designed to bring home to the British public just what membership of the EU means as regards controlling our own borders,’ the Ukip leader said.

- ‘The White Cliffs of Dover have always been seen as symbolic of Britain’s island status. That status should give us added ability to pick and choose the people who come to live and work in our country. But under EU free movement laws we have no serious control whatever.

Digital age

-       Social media

-       Influential to the younger members of society because they are most known to use these platforms, reaching them may have been the result of the increased number of young people voting in the 2017 election

-       As Wim Crouwel said ‘you can’t do better design with a computer but you can speed up your work enormously’ meaning that more politically relevant prints are being made and distributed within society to a larger audience than when everything would have relied on traditional printing methods.

Illustration

• -       Common method of visual communication
• -       Wider audience of people because it can reach those on social media with a slightly lower level of formality
• -       Colour is often the main form of identity in association to the particular party
• -       Green Party ‘end period poverty’ campaign
• -       Used when methods such as photography would not be appropriate