The strength of this brief is that in my essay I have tackled current and relevant issues which affect us all as designers. The strength of the practical is that it is simple and to the point. The weakness of the practical is that it is rather simple.
Luckily as I was creating a social media campaign I only needed digital production methods, although for the handwritten type I used pencil and scanned it in. I think actual handwritten type looks far more authentic than any 'handwriting' fonts.
I don't think I took many risks with my design as I was pretty stressed about this module, however it is different to my usual projects as it is corporate.
I find coming up with ideas and creating them the easiest part of the design process. The most difficult part for me is writing justification and explaining my thoughts as I myself hardly understand how my brain works.
I do not feel that I achieved my full potential in this module but I never feel like I achieve my full potential in anything because I hate myself a bit
This module is the one I found most stressful so far as I am inexperienced with essay writing
"Globalization, or globalisation, is the process of interaction and integration among people, companies, and governments worldwide. Globalization has accelerated since the 18th century due to advances in transportation and communication technology."
Why has globalisation increased?
- increase in transport availability, such as ships and aeroplanes means goods can be transported quickly and cheaply
- the internet had made communication pretty much instantaneous
- payment systems such as online banking and paypal mean payments are faster and more secure
why is globalisation bad for sustainability?
- transporting goods around the world produces greenhouse gasses from the vehicles used
- cheap labour costs (exploitation) of workers in 3rd world countries means products are cheaper, leading people to buy more
- by moving production to countries with less stringent environmental protection laws, companies can pollute the planet and get away with it
How has globalisation impacted design?
- products being sold in many different countries means that designers have to consider cultural differences and contexts. they need to create designs which can be universally understood
- globalisation and the rise of internet shopping means consumers are overwhelmed with choice, so designs need to be innovative and eye catching
- global cultures are less isolated than they were in the past as we are now able to communicate through the internet and share aesthetics easily. as a result designers are able to take inspiration from cultures around the world much more easily.
"The influence of designers has grown dramatically. That influence is today at its peak and carries with it the capacity to do much good, and just as much damage. As with any profession, the ethical responsibilities of every individual practitioner are challenged on a daily basis. Other professionals—doctors, lawyers, journalists—inscribe their professional responsibilities on flags held high. (And most of them, we hope and expect, act accordingly.)
Designers, I am afraid, are often poor communicators when it comes to explaining what it is they do. It is indeed strange that designers – those professionals often given the responsibility for creating and communicating the critically important and valuable “brands” of entities large and small – are so irresponsible and ineffective when it comes to communicating their own value, their own “brand”.
I think that this serious professional deficiency is rooted in the typical image of the designer, fostered in design schools, which too often shapes and promotes the designer as an artistic, individualistic creative as opposed to becoming a highly-trained professional with ethical responsibilities to society. Correcting this situation requires collective action by the professional design community and cannot be accomplished by individuals alone."
"A can of orange drink takes a journey around the world in design and branding.
Do you fear that the internet and its globalising effect will take away our sense of identity? It is easy to believe that the invasive influence of worldwide connectivity could bring a bland uniformity to art and design. In a bid to explore trends in design around the world, Nuprint undertook an experiment. Taking 12 designers from 12 countries around the world, they asked for the label for a can of orange carbonated drink.
If our fears are to be founded, then there will be none of the diversity of design we have grown used to when shopping in a foreign land. Artists, taking influence from the material they consume in the digital sphere, will offer a similar vision of a can with an orange on the front. However, barring the noticeable language difference, Nuprint discovered that the packaging design remained distinct to the country of origin.
Here we take you on a trip around the world, stopping off in six of the countries who offered designs. How will a can of carbonated orange drink represent a national identity?"
my idea is to show how easy it is for brands to deceptive about their environmental impact through advertising. I will be doing this by creating a social media campaign for the company 'Shein' - a China based fast fashion company who are known for having a huge inventory and very cheap prices. Their environmental record is terrible, with profit being prioritised over everything else. This project will link to my brief by demonstrating firstly that sustainability is becoming a 'trend' in advertising, and also that globalisation means companies can operate from anywhere in the world and have a worldwide market, partly due to the ease of social media advertising.
platforms:
instagram. From my research, 1 out of every 4 posts seen when scrolling the home page is a sponsored advert.
facebook
snapchat filter - by far the most interactive - there are now filters where you can virtually try on a brands clothes or alter your face to look like the product being sold.
advancements in technology have completely changed the way advertising works - traditional newspaper print, billboards and TV adverts are of course still around, but now a lot of advertising is done online. This can be in the 'banner' format, where an advert appears at the side or bottom of a webpage:
it can also be on social media - with the option to pay for advertising to ensure it reaches customers, or just by operating a social media page for the brand.
by operating on social media, customers are able to interact with the advertisements they are seeing by liking, commenting, sharing etc
they can also enhance their brand 'personality' by interacting with consumers.
Tuesday 5 January 2021
looking at visual language in advertisements of ethical fashion companies
neutral tones with pops of colour
photos outdoors/ with plants
handwritten type
patagonia did a really interesting campaign:
this campaign actually shows the impact of fast fashion by showing landfill alongside the models. this is quite jarring and forces people to think about the consequences of their consumption.
this advert actually provides facts as to why the product is environmentally friendly
but look ooh i can make an advert and trick people into associating it with environmental wellbeing using the power of *graphic design*
a 'haul' is a popular genre of youtube video where someone buys a vast amount of clothing/ accessories and tries them on whilst giving commentary. videos like this encourage over-consumption and companies such as Shein make it easy for people to over consume with their cheap prices, constant sales and vast inventory.
SHEIN's environment rating is 'very poor'. There is no evidence that it has taken meaningful action to reduce or eliminate hazardous chemicals. It uses few eco-friendly materials. There is no evidence it reduces its carbon and other greenhouse gas emissions in its supply chain. There is no evidence it has a policy to minimise the impacts of microplastics.
Its labour rating is 'very poor'. There is no evidence it has worker empowerment initiatives such as collective bargaining or rights to make a complaint. It sources its final stage of production from countries with extreme risk of labour abuse. There is no evidence it ensures payment of a living wage in its supply chain. It audits some of its supply chain but does not specify what percentage. It does not disclose any policies or safeguards to protect suppliers and workers in its supply chain from the impacts of COVID-19.
Its animal rating is 'it's a start'. There is no evidence it has a policy to minimise the suffering of animals. It uses wool. It does not use leather, exotic animal hair, fur, down, angora, or exotic animal skin. There is no evidence it traces any animal product to the first stage of production.
SHEIN is rated 'We avoid' overall.
Last Updated: December 2020
"Shein issuesabout 500 new items a day,all at extremely low prices. And if it seems too good to be true, that’s because it is.
Fast fashion creates cheap, mass-produced clothing articles that are modeled on celebrity or high-end fashion trends. The clothes are not made to be long-lasting and can usually only be worn a few times before deteriorating. The industry is incredibly harmful to the environment, with fashion being the second most polluting industry in the world.
Aside from the pollution caused by the means of production, the nature of fast fashion clothes, which are meant to be thrown away after only a season of wearing them, creates a lot of unnecessary waste."
for my project i will create a green-washed social media campaign for this company to demonstrate how graphic design can influence people's perception of a companies ethics with out the company actually changing their practices.
'Greenwashing, also called "green sheen", is a form of marketing spin in which green PR and green marketing are deceptively used to persuade the public that an organization's products, aims and policies are environmentally friendly. '
Article from the guardian:
The troubling evolution of corporate greenwashing
The term “greenwashing” was coined in the 1980s to describe outrageous corporate environmental claims. Three decades later, the practice has grown vastly more sophisticated
Demonstrators protest against Nestle water bottling operations in California. According to news reports, Nestle, which operates five bottling plants in California, uses 244m gallons of water annually. Reports also said that its state water permit expired 27 years ago. Photograph: Eugene Garcia/EPA
In the mid-1980s, oil company Chevron commissioned a series of expensive television and print ads to convince the public of its environmental bonafides. Titled People Do, the campaign showed Chevron employees protecting bears, butterflies, sea turtles and all manner of cute and cuddly animals.
The commercials were very effective – in 1990, they won an Effie advertising award, and subsequently became a case study at Harvard Business school. They also became notorious among environmentalists, who have proclaimed them the gold standard of greenwashing – the corporate practice of making diverting sustainability claims to cover a questionable environmental record.
The term greenwashing was coined by environmentalist Jay Westerveld in 1986, back when most consumers received their news from television, radio and print media – the same outlets that corporations regularly flooded with a wave of high-priced, slickly-produced commercials and print ads. The combination of limited public access to information and seemingly unlimited advertising enabled companies to present themselves as caring environmental stewards, even as they were engaging in environmentally unsustainable practices.
But greenwashing dates back even earlier. American electrical behemoth Westinghouse’s nuclear power division was a greenwashing pioneer. Threatened by the 1960’s anti-nuclear movement, which raised questions about its safety and environmental impact, it fought back with a series of ads proclaiming the cleanliness and safety of nuclear power plants. One, featuring a photograph of a nuclear plant nestled by a pristine lake, proclaimed that “We’re building nuclear power plants to give you more electricity,” and went on to say that nuclear plants were “odorless [...] neat, clean, and safe”.
Some of these claims were true: in 1969, Westinghouse nuclear plants were producing large amounts of cheap electricity with far less air pollution than competing coal plants. However, given that the ads appeared after nuclear meltdowns had already occurred in Michigan and Idaho, the word “safe” was arguable. Westinghouse’s ads also ignored concerns about the environmental impact of nuclear waste, which has continued to be a problem.
The mysterious case of the stolen towels
In 1983, when Jay Westerveld first got the idea for the term greenwashing, he wasn’t thinking about nuclear power – he was thinking about towels. An undergraduate student on a research trip to Samoa, he stopped off in Fiji to surf. At the sprawling Beachcomber Resort, he saw a note asking customers to pick up their towels. “It basically said that the oceans and reefs are an important resource, and that reusing the towels would reduce ecological damage,” Westerveld recalls. “They finished by saying something like, ‘Help us to help our environment’.”
Westerveld wasn’t actually staying at the resort – he was lodging at a “grubby” guesthouse nearby, and had just snuck in to steal some clean towels. Even so, he was struck by the note’s irony: while it claimed to be protecting the island’s ecosystem, he says, the Beachcomber – which, today, describes itself as “the most sought-after destination in the South Pacific” – was expanding. “I don’t think they really cared all that much about the coral reefs,” he says. “They were in the middle of expanding at the time, and were building more bungalows.”
Three years later, in 1986, when he was writing a term paper on multiculturalism, Westerveld remembered the note. “I finally wrote something like, ‘It all comes out in the greenwash.’ A guy in the class with me worked for a literary magazine and had me write an essay about it.” And, as the magazine had a large readership in nearby New York City, it wasn’t long before the term caught on in the wider media.
Westerveld’s essay came out a year after the launch of Chevron’s People Do campaign. As critics later pointed out, many of the environmental programs that Chevron promoted in its campaign were mandated by law. They were also relatively inexpensive when compared with the cost of Chevron’s ad budget: environmental activist Joshua Karliner estimated that Chevron’s butterfly preserve cost it $5,000 per year to run, while the ads promoting it cost millions of dollars to produce and broadcast.
“People are getting more aware of the rarity of the Earth and the ways that our actions impact it,” says Jason Ballard, CEO of sustainable home improvement retailer TreeHouse. At the same time, he notes, greenwashing has become more complex. “It’s the dark side of a very positive development,” he says.
One shift has been outreach. Many companies are now working to engage customers in their sustainability efforts, even as their core business model remains environmentally unsustainable. The Home Depot and Lowes, for example, both encourage customers to do their part by offering onsite recycling for several products, including compact fluorescent lights and plastic bags. Meanwhile, they continue to sell billions of dollars per year worth of environmentally damaging products, such as paints that are loaded with toxic ingredients and which release noxious fumes.
“It’s misdirection, and it’s intended to shift the customer’s focus from a company’s appalling behaviors to something that’s peripheral,” Ballard says.
The bottled water conundrum
Another trend, says Jonah Sachs, CEO of branding agency Free Range Studios, is linking sustainability claims to other issues, such as personal health. “There’s this perception that personal health and environmental sustainability are two sides of the same coin,” he says. “Sometimes this is true, but many times it isn’t. Bottled water is a great example: in terms of health, it’s much better than soda or other drinks, but in terms of the environment and sustainability, it’s ridiculous.”
The water industry trades heavily on images of rugged mountains and pristine lakes to sell its products. And many companies – Nestle, in particular – spend millions of dollars trying to convince the public that their bottled water isn’t only good to drink, but is also good for the planet. Over the past few years, the bottled water giant has claimed that its Eco-Shape bottle is more efficient, that its Resource recycled plastic bottle is more environmentally responsible and that its use of plant-based plastics is less damaging to the planet.
In 2008, Nestle Waters Canada even ran an ad claiming: “Bottled water is the most environmentally responsible consumer product in the world.” Several Canadian groups quickly filed a complaint against the company. Five years later, during Earth Day 2013, the International Bottled Water Association doubled down on the sustainability claims, announcing that bottled water was “the face of positive change” because the industry was using less plastic in its bottles and relying more on recycled plastic.
And the water that goes in the bottles is often equally unsustainable. Nestle’s Arrowhead water claims that “Mother Nature is our muse” and boasts that it “has a team of experts dedicated to watching over each one of our 13 spring sources” to ensure responsible water stewardship. This sounds promising until one considers that those springs are in California, which has been in a state of drought for five years. The company also bottles water in Arizona and Oregon, both of which are also experiencing droughts.
A golden oldie
Some of the classic greenwashers are also taking cues from the new greenwashing playbook. In 2013, amid worries about unemployment and continued concerns about energy sustainability, Westinghouse put a fresh face on its old claims with a brand new commercial. “Did you know that nuclear energy is the largest source of clean air energy in the world?” the ad asked viewers right before claiming that its nuclear power plants “provide cleaner air, create jobs, and help sustain the communities where they operate”.
What the commercial failed to mention was that, two years earlier, Westinghouse was cited by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission for concealing flaws in its reactor designs and submitting false information to regulators. And, in February 2016, another plant that uses Westinghouse reactors, New York’s Indian Point, leaked radioactive material into the surrounding area’s groundwater.
Greenwashing may have taken on a new shape in the last decade, but it’s still as murky as ever.
Some examples of green washing in current advertising:
H&M, the fast fashion company known for its cheap clothing and vast amount of products, has made efforts over the past few years to seem as if they care about the environment. One way they have done this is by introducing recycling bins for garments in some of their stores:
By inviting people to recycle their old clothes they can make consumers, who are becoming increasingly environmentally conscious, feel less guilty about their new purchases. The issue is, H&Ms business model relies on the rapid buying and replacing of garments by the consumer, and recycling a small amount of these items will not neutralise the impact the production of the garments has on the environment.
H&M have also introduced a new collection called 'H&M conscious' which is sold alongside their regular products. The garments in this collection are made more sustainably and are marketed as being better quality, which encourages the consumer to keep them for longer before replacing them. However, having a small portion of your product range being made sustainably does not make up for the massive environmental impact that the other 95% of the product range has. Thus, we have a classic example of green washing.
Looking at the H&M conscious adverts, we can see the use of design to communicate the idea that these products are environmentally friendly.
In two of the above examples, the models have been photographed outside surrounded by nature and plants - this will make the viewer associate the clothing with environments which look like the ones photographed, instead of the ones H&M actually create with their clothing production:
clothing waste at a landfill
The styling of the models also influences how the viewer perceives the brand - they are styled in natural looking, flowing fabrics with organic floral prints. The clothing they wear looks vintage inspired and so is associated with a time in the past where dresses were handmade and worn until they fell apart.
The use of the distinctive green colour further separates the 'conscious collection' from H&Ms regular brand - it is featured on the clothing's labels as well as in the adverts and on the recycling stations. It goes without saying that the colour green is associated with nature and the environment.
from medium.com:
Greenwashing in the age of social media
The term whitewashing has historically been used to describe the act of covering one’s crimes, like the use of whitewash paint to cover graffiti or other blemishes. Greenwashing is the act of outwardly promoting sustainable ideas to draw attention away from the waste produced or lack of benefits. As people become more aware of the potential external costs of buying something like a bottle of water, their tastes and preferences may shift away from their normal purchases. To get ahead of this change, many companies have adapted greenwashing tactics which carefully sidestep federal regulations regarding false advertising and work to provide a counter argument for the part of your brain telling you it isn’t worth the potential costs. You don’t have to feel bad about buying a bottle of Fiji water since Every drop is greengiven that they donate to protect Fijian rainforests. That has to offset any costs incurred in the production of the bottle and extraction of the water, right?
The idea of selling moral values rather than the product itself is nothing new but with the rise of social media, they have had to change their approach. In traditional media, greenwashed messages would be presented by themselves as fact however now if a company makes a statement on a platform like social media, they invite response. An example of the failed use of a self-serving message as an ad campaign would be McDonald’s “#McDStories” which encouraged users to post about their favorite experience at one of the franchise’s establishments. The responses they received were stories of food poisoning and poor labor conditions. Outreach of this type attempts to gain legitimacy with consumers by conforming to social norms. However as those social norms become more sustainable, so does the corporate outreach. To gain and maintain “environmental legitimacy” many companies have begun separating their public activities from their essential and internal activities. This typically entails a lack of data collection on byproducts like pollution produced in foreign countries to prevent accusations of negligence by providing a defense in the form of feigned ignorance.
Credence goodsare products with properties that can’t be known by the consumer simply by using it. Properties like whether the people who made it were adequately compensated or whether it was made with recycled materials can’t be independently verified by the consumer. It’s difficult for a consumer to make an informed decision when companies purposefully leave out data about their production methods and individuals don’t have the means of determining all the costs. The above example is a television advertisement for a Colombian oil company that claims it produces “clean” barrels of oil through vague imagery related to nature but no visualization of the oil extraction process. This gets to the core of the greenwashing issue which is that it is a problem of access to information. If we weren’t so reliant on consumer watchdog groups to do follow up research on corporate sustainability claims, usually well after the claims have had their intended effect, then we might be in a position to make wiser decisions with a better idea of the real costs versus the advertised benefits. Perhaps it will be changes to government policy or maybe the vocal minority which will force companies to reveal the whole picture.
More examples of green washing in advertising:
Themes: minimalism, images of nature, images of clear skies, the colour green
