OUIL403 Visual Skills - Day In The Life Idea Generation and Roughs

The article that I was given for this brief was about companies paying female employee's to have their eggs frozen so that they could focus on their career without the pressure of their 'ideal childbearing years conflicting with crucial career building years'. I read through the article quite a few times and highlighted key quotes that stood out to me but I felt that I didn't feel any connection to the article and that it wasn't something that I felt emotive about. This made it quite difficult to generate any ideas that I felt were quite interesting or that I was quite passionate about. 

Example of initial sketches and idea generation

I started off with a mind map and then started sketching some roughs out in my sketchbook in proportion to the dimensions that we were giving in the briefing. From there I started on my roughs that were the same size as the final illustrations would be. I managed to do 3 different roughs of ideas for each 3 of the different formats and tried to arrange them in sets afterwards so that I could see which would work best together. 

Examples of the 3 formats the Illustrations had to be produced in

First set of roughs

Second set of roughs

Final set of roughs and the set that I decided to carry forward

Because I personally didn't have an extreme opinion on this article I wanted to create a set of Illustrations that revolved around and fit with the content of the article but I wanted them to be quite neutral on the subject matter as thats how I felt towards it. 

The square image will be just an Illustration of eggs. I feel that even though this is quite simple and straightforward, it covered the topic of the article and also because it's the largest image, it's probably going to be the one that catches peoples eyes first. Therefore when they see this image they will know that the article covers the theme of fertility in women. 

The landscape image is a set of different figures in test tubes. I feel that this image could work quite well because it brings the idea of science and egg freezing into the picture. Once again although it is quite simple I feel that as long as it is executed well it could be quite a striking Illustration of life in test tubes which is one of the first things that comes to mind when thinking of things such as egg freezing etc. 

The portrait image is a pregnant woman sat in an egg timer. This represents the fact that there is a time limit on women to have children and the eggs falling through the timer represent that time running out when conflicting with other aspects of life. The city on top of the egg timer represents the pressure that women can sometimes feel when having to consider whether they want to start a family or focus more on their careers.