In their international poster competition, Mumedi (the Mexican Museum of Design), calls designers, students, teachers, professionals and anyone interested in the subject to participate in responding to the brief "To Death with a Smile". The brief is about death, about how we deal with it and how we celebrate or fear it around the world. The theme is very unusual and is something quite challenging to communicate. We had just under 2 weeks to conceptualise and create our response to this theme.
I began my process with mind mapping all of the different things we understand as death, its symbols, who it affects and how it affects us as individuals and as a society. I tried to think of both the serious side, for example, the death of loved ones, and more lighthearted or abstract visions of death. For me, having seen some successful examples from past years, it seemed that the humorous approach got a good response from both viewers and judges of the competition. I wanted to move away from the human centered experience of death so I began to focus on areas of my mind map which explored death in other ways. It came down to a choice of 2/3 of my ideas but ultimately I decided that I could graphically show the infamous Black Widow Spider in the most visually appealing and humorous way in the time allowed.
I feel I spent quite a big chunk of time trying to gather materials for a very specific image I had in my mind. On a practical level, the challenges were I wasn't able to find pink and blue jelly spiders (despite Halloween being around the corner!), especially ones which visually represented the Black Widow. I then bought a spider mould and set about making my own with gelatin, but the finished result wasn't detailed or defined enough to be clear in a photograph. The viewer seeing the spider reference is clearly vital to the success of delivering the message. Eventually, I found some larger jelly spiders in a sweet shop but they only came in orange and yellow, so I settled on using these and then changing the colours in post-production.
We only had one group discussion tutorial for this project. To this tutorial, I took my idea, inspiration and sketches of how I would compose the image. I felt that the general feedback was positive, but I came away with a few things to consider. It was suggested that I should try and bring in a more humanistic element to the poster, in order to make people laugh. There were a few different suggestions on how I might do this, from placing the sweets back into a lifelike situation, to having a simple line of copy to go alongside the visual. Personally, I felt that putting the sweets back into say, a sweet shop, would distract from the original thing I was trying to illustrate (the female spider eating the male spider). As a result of the feedback I got in the crit, I decided to add an illustrative overlay and a short line of copy in an attempt to humanise the spiders and in turn accentuate the humor.
"Until death do us part" - I chose this as my copy line because it is suggestive of the key elements which make up my posters narrative: love/marriage/romantic partnership, and death bringing that to an end.
The most challenging part of this project was trying to bring all the elements together in a way that people could quickly understand. It became a challenge to ensure I wasn't mixing up my metaphors. I had the spider image, the fact they were jelly sweets, the colours of the spiders to show the male and female and the miniature knife and fork to contend with. Originally I had chosen to work with confectionary to get across the food/eating element to the narative, but my feeling is that it became too much and rather confusing to the viewer. Eventually, I also added a line of copy to try and bring all of these elements together. The poster's success relies heavily on the viewer already having background knowledge of the Black Widow Spider and what relation that has to death. The connection of jelly sweets being edible and her eating him isn't quite as instant as I would have hoped. Ultimately I feel there are too many dots for the viewer to connect here - they'll probably just move on from it instead.