This is a postcard about the importance of conversations that evolved from something I made at uni as part of an hour long brief in early December last year. This brief involved creating a poster in black and white, using 15 A4 sheets and displaying any phrase we wanted. It had to relate to our project title, back then mine was ‘journeys’, long before it became ‘graphic props’. The time limit given made this brief hard as 1 hour from concept to finished outcome isn’t easy, so I began by thinking of a phrase as this would be a good place to start and could then inform the design of my poster.
After making a few gifs the week before, showing ways people say goodbye, which happened to be a forerunner of my “21 Ways To Say Goodbye’ gif video, I had become more interested in exploring ways of communication. I took English Language A-Level and remember studying how important simple conversations are to keeping language alive and so came up with a statement promoting people to talk to each other. “The small conversations are still important! Don’t let language disappear, keep language alive!” As time goes on, digital communication makes more and more of a presence in everyday life. If we want spoken language to keep evolving, changing and expanding, we need to use it regularly and all conversations, no matter how small, help do that. Perhaps go and talk to your sister who’s just on the other side of the room, rather than avoiding it and texting her instead.
I made several sketches to work out the arrangement of my 15 sheets of paper as it was a deliberately awkward number to design on. To fit on 15 sheets, I chose to keep my design rectangular and just leave off the top right corner as this negative space could represent language disappearing.