Visual Communication Episode 6 - Culture

What is culture? The dictionary defines 'culture' as the following:

• the arts and other manifestations of human intellectual achievement regarded collectively : 20th century popular culture.
• a refined understanding or appreciation of this : men of culture.
• the customs, arts, social institutions, and achievements of a particular nation, people, or other social group : Caribbean culture | people from many different cultures.
• [with adj. ] the attitudes and behavior characteristic of a particular social group : the emerging drug culture.

We use this word a lot in our daily lives, applying it to different contextual subjects. E.g. Mass Culture, aka Popular Culture, a commercial culture is is mass produced to reach the mass of audiences.

There is also the Counter Culture, e.g. the Hippies, for they try to introduce a different set of values into the society they live in, with their beliefs more intellectually based and backed up by rationality.

Then we have the Sub-Cultures, such as Christian culture, Gothic culture, Arts culture, Football culture, Japanese culture, etc. These cultures are different to Counter Cultures because Sub Cultures themselves are pretty much a set of rules, instead of defying those rules and trying to introduce new values like the Counter Cultures do, we instead follow these rules in order to fit in.
For example, Gothic Culture, in order to become part of that culture, one would have to follow the rules in the Gothic culture, e.g. dress code. Wear full-black clothing, dyeing your hair black, and maybe even throw some black mascara in for overkill, and voila, you're a perfect example of a Goth.

We don't really notice these cultures and whatnot in our usual everyday mundane lives, we've become so accustomed to them that we barely notice them, or barely pay attention to them. We just accept them as they are. If one's walking on the street and see a person in a gothic dresscode, and obviously he/she is going to think, "Wow, that person is Gothic." or something along the lines of that. We become so immersed in these cultures, that we ourselves sometimes forget that we're in some cultures ourselves too, whether it is our nationality's culture, our school culture, or to look at it in the simplest way, the way we dress itself fall under a certain culture.

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In Graphic Design, we have to take into consideration and notice these cultures and how they vary. We do this in order to understand our TARGET MARKETS, their culture depicts their how they act, how they react, how their mind works; and in doing so we can manipulate our designs in order to make our message really REACH OUT to them EFFECTIVELY.

In order to understand this concept more effectively, we(in groups) picked a random magazine and decided to analyze it in terms of:

• Materiality Check: Layout, typography
• Message of the book
• Target audience

Our group analyzed an issue of Monocle, and discovered the following:
Materiality:
• Jacket is a softcover cardstock, coated.
• Adhesive bookbinding.
• High-quality recycled paper, with a few mixed stocks thrown in
• Very clean and neat layouts
• Moderate amount of ads in relation to the amount of pages
• Some ads are subtle, and blends into the contents of the book. You won't realise it's an ad unless you look carefully.
• Ads also relate to a lot to what the magazine is about: lifestyle, money, etc.
• The designs of the ads are at least of the intermediate, or professional level.


Messages:
• "The Perfect Landscape Block" pull-out is too idealistic, their ideas are too focused and based on the rich lifestyle. e.g. A so-called PERFECT landscape block does not necessarily need a golf-course, or a 'Monocle" shop, or 3 basketball courts side-by-side
• The concept of the magazine is revealed on the website, www.monocle.com
⁃ "Monocle is a global briefing covering international affairs, business, culture and design."
⁃ "Developed for an international audience hungry for information across a variety of sectors."
• Monocle's team of editors and correspondents have won awards, and have been drawn from The New York Times, The Independent on Sunday, BBC, CBC, and a host of other news and current affairs outlets.
• Monocle's designed to be more of a book than a magazine, it's made to be highly portable, robust, and collectable.
• While the print focuses more the 2D stuff, the online website focuses on broadcasting videos, slideshows, and audio reports.
• Monocle's edited by the founder of Wallpaper* and columnist of Financial Times, Tyler Brule.
• In both the print and online, writers and photographers are dispatched to over 50 countries every issue to gather stories and deliver it to the audience.

In this fine example, pages and pages of the magazine just seems to emit the same message over and over again, "You should, you should have, you should think about, you should do it." The content just seems to be wanting to dictate our everyday lives. A 'Perfect' landscape block should have a golf course? I live in the western suburbs, it's hard enough to find a golf course as it is, but one on the block? I guess where i live is obviously not the 'perfect' place then.

I've included some examples from the magazine, which pretty much explains what the magazine is about:



Having seven donkeys will improve my life? Why didn't anyone tell me earlier? *rushes to buy twenty-one donkeys* Three times' the charm.

- April 15th lesson