LEAPing into Design

By Nicola Brand and Lauren Macnab

As designers for the “Take a LEAP” team, we have positioned ourselves as instruments through which communicating Makana’s environmental issues and concerns takes on a visually appealing and exciting stance. We are faced with the task of filtering the somewhat tedious and monotonous policies, problems and opinions of the Makana municipality and community through design-based imperatives in order to produce media that is not only appealing to the target audience, but also widely understandable and accessible.

However, given both the financial restrictions we face and the nature of the content that we aim to communicate through our design, ‘traditional’ design ventures – such as magazines and newspapers – are not the primary solution to the efficient production, distribution and communication of the content. With financial issues, the content and the target audience being determining factors on the area of design that we have adopted for this project, we have veered more toward designing media that is cost effective yet still effective. We aim to produce media productions which are widely understandable, accessible, and distribution-efficient.

In working as a part of the WEPD team for “Take a LEAP”, we have agreed with the writers on appropriate content for design media. With the WEPD team following stories on the Goat Village and Makana’s LEAP (Local Environment Action Plan), we as the designers have decided to use the practice of design to make these stories more interesting, more visual and more understandable, while adopting non-bias, neutral view toward the municipality and the community. In other words, in implementing sections of these stories into our design, we are neutralizing content that could be taken as being bias or subjective. For example, the writing story covering the issues on LEAP exposes the flaws of Makana municipality in their inability to properly and effectively implement their environmental policies, whereas the design side of the story turns the issues into that of education.

With the LEAP story, we are aiming to design an educational pamphlet that aspires to educate the public (our target audience) about LEAP. This pamphlet will adopt the theme (identity, colours and intentions) of our group and visually communicate the content derived from LEAP, with the intention on educating the public on a very important part of their municipality’s policy that there most likely are oblivious to. This pamphlet will be simple, yet effective and appropriately communicative in its simplicity. In its visual communication it will include diagrams, tables, cartoons, graphs and other visual elements that make understanding LEAP more simple and exciting. This pamphlet will be produced and distributed with the intention of accompanying the story based on LEAP in Makana. It will add volume and colour to the LEAP story and perhaps another dimension or understanding to the issues brought forward and discussed in the story. We are intending to mass-print the pamphlet on normal printing paper in order to widely and easily distribute it to the community – on campus, in the suburbs, in town and in the township.

Another design project that we have chosen to take on for “Take a LEAP” WEPD team in the production of a movable banner – a visual representation of the opinions of the community regarding water, electricity and waster removal in Makana. This banner will be a large material banner that is appropriate for people to clearly write down their opinions on any of the above specified areas. Multi-coloured permanent markers will be used as the writing tools, where citizens of Makana will be granted the opportunity to write, draw or symbolize in any way possible their thoughts and opinions. This allows for the inclusion of the illiterate and uneducated in the project, as their opinions are as important to us as the literate and educated.

This banner will be moved and positioned in different locations in Grahamstown – Pick ‘n Pay, Checkers, Shoprite and on the Rhodes University campus – in order to provide a platform for the variety of voices that constitute the Grahamstown community. We, as the designers, are hoping to take this design idea further once the above mentioned initial stage has been completed. We are looking into the possibilities of using the actual banner itself, in a design sense, to further communicate and substantiate the content of our project as a whole.

The third design venture is related to the Goat Village story where we are intending to design a brochure or flyer to promote the Goat Village and make the public aware of it. We see this as a form of social marketing (not propaganda) where we are – in line with the goals of “Take a LEAP” – aiming to the make the public aware of a local project that is beneficial to the society and brings a positive aspect into the Makana community. Information around the Goat Village is still being gathered and filtered, therefore, directed and focused design decisions regarding this story can only be properly initiated once the content has been appropriately gathered to insure consistency and relevance across “Take a LEAP” media.

As designers we have taken on the task of creating a united identity for “Take a LEAP” – including television media, photo-slide media and WEPD media. “Take a LEAP” was formed out of the groups goal of urging the community (through our media) to get to know the municipality (a neutral view to both the community and the municipality). We formed this united view in order to ensure consistency and relevance throughout the media. With this in mind, we designers will design a group logo to accompany our goal and slogan – “Take a LEAP, get to know your municipality”. This logo will symbolize our position as environmental journalists who represent both sides of the story. Along with this, we have thematic colours for our media, especially that of design. These are green (environmental), orange (bright, colourful and contrasting to green), black and white.