Description
The United Nations has requested an 11x17 poster to commemorate the 77th anniversary of the Declaration of Human Rights. They've asked the I pick a specific article from the available 30, and deliver a design that speaks to the spirit of that article.
For this deliverable I chose article 13.
Everyone has the right to freedom of movement and residence within the borders of each state.
Research & Rationale
My first step was to understand the message, and I selected the following words from the article to look for meaning: Borders, Everyone, Free, Freedom, State.
I wanted to approach each of these words from a different direction, so I looked up each word in a thesaurus. With a growing number of words, I engaged ChatGPT and for each word I felt was nebulous , I asked for a list of words that could be used to visualize each.
I captured my research in a mind map and looked for not only words that could be easily sketched, but also 'out of the box' directions to pursue.
Inspiration
I found interesting word clusters from my mind map: Horizon, Sunset, Roadblock, Birds, Terrain.
As part of my research process I studied the works of Takashi Murakami and his ultra-flat style for inspiration.
Graphite thumbnail sketches
By gathering so many keywords that needed no interpretation and could quickly sketched, I could use them to then create a set of unique pairings and sketch those.
This gave me interesting combinations such as bird+ frame etc. This worked out extremely well and gave me a large number of sketches I could then use to work with.
digital thumbnail sketches
With all of my graphite sketches laid out in front of me, I looked for any ideas that could be brought together into a digital thumbnail. I felt this was an important step because it continued to build bigger concepts from smaller ones.
These three digital thumbnails then coalesced into something unexpected.
Submission for comment
I wanted to push beyond anything I had done before and landed on this idea. You can see the inspiration Takashi Murakami's ultra-flat style present.
Final
I feel that this was a major step forward for me and was so happy to see my work pay off. I think this evolution of my ideation process and execution has helped me begin to find my own voice.
