Week Six: Rationale

This project responds to the aspects of Kaitiakitanga, the guardianship of resources and ethical considerations, where we have created a video, and designed a website that promotes the concept of “Small action, big impact.” Within this we have focused on the concept of sourcing your produce locally by skipping the Supermarket.  The direction we have chosen for our video is a compare and contrast between the markets and the supermarket, where the footage depicts the over-arching idea that the markets are the superior choice of the two.  The website compliments this, where it is entirely based on the markets. Both the video and the website visually highlight an overall theme that is both organic and natural looking, whilst providing additional information to increase the participation in sourcing from the local markets.

Within the film, it is through body language, including facial expressions and body posture and through adjusting the colour of the footage that we have achieved this direction. To convey the markets as the superior choice we have used body language that is welcoming and appealing, where the experience looks enjoyable. Furthermore, we increased the saturation very marginally, as it was already very bright and colourful. In contrast, the body language used within the supermarket footage demonstrates boredom and confusion, where the experience looks displeasing. The saturation for this footage was decreased to give emphasis to this. Additionally, we also used background music to give further prominence to this contrast, where for each, the background music is used to compliment the two atmospheres of the locations. For the market, we have an up beat, guitar instrumental and for the supermarket we have used muzak, accompanied by the generic checkout ‘beep’. Within the film we chop and change between the two, to again, show the contrast of the two locations.

It is through visual language that we achieved an organic and natural theme within the website, with the use bright colour choices, and market related imagery, where visually the images used within the site reflect a natural and organic appearance that is clean cut, yet not commercial looking. Within the site we used colour to provide visual emphasis toward our theme, so that the web user would get a sense of it before they read into the body copy. The use of repetition in images and colour was also utilised in order to create a website that visually worked together as a whole. In terms of the interaction of the site and web user, we utilised the aspect of a navigational menu and the use of buttons to create an interesting a responsive site. Our typographic approach reflected our theme, where the font we used for our headers reflects an organic, playful feel. For the body copy we kept it refined and simple, this was it would not compete with the heading and would be easily read and processed by the reader.

The video and the website follow a narrative to engage, inform and provide a call to action for our audience. Our narrative is about the task of grocery shopping, where we cover the experience of shopping at the super market in contrast to shopping at the markets.  To inform and provide a call to action we have presented the markets as a superior choice, to encourage people to source locally, justifying this with information and statistics within the site.  

Throughout our design process we learnt that you can never have enough trial and error moments, where through trialling numerous design choices and techniques we were able to determine what we did like and what we didn't.  Through this process we were able to critique our own work to ensure that we were creating a design and video that was to the best of our ability. Furthermore, we learnt that our ability to work well as partners, where we were both on the same page and both worked fast, enabled us to make changes and alterations in short spaces of time. This resulted in taking our work from a mediocre standard to a higher standard in a short amount  of time.  If we were to work on one thing for a future project that included web design, we would look into the concept of learning responsive website techniques, we would also look toward planning out the measurements better within our css.