brief 5 - the big idea

Whimsical! A not so spontaneous outburst there. This brief saw us being given a selection of words, of which we had to choose a solitary one and then develop an outcome with that word as its basis. Confused yet? So, out of my list of words the only one I had any excitement about was whimsical. Therefore, I ran with that.

Researching the word whimsical is surprisingly difficult, you don't tend to get many enjoyable result. You get several web sites that offer the definition and then countless businesses that have named themselves whimsical (insert business type here). As a tip, if you are in the same situation and you do Google 'whimsical' expecting mountains of bizarre and enthralling creations think again. The main saviour of this researching slump was Twitter. I found bucket fulls of weird and wacky web sites, blogs, videos and creations. One of which being yarn bombing, check it out, it's crazy.

After my research came the research presentation, where I exhibited what I had found. One necessary part to the presentation was to identify a loose target audience. It was this that, pretty much, gave me my concept. An audience I felt would be enjoyable was serious people who lack any form of whimsy. From this came the concept of taking these mundane individuals and making them come across as full of whimsy.

The outcome was to be based on the situation you find yourself in when you have a pen and a picture of a celebrity (or anyone for that matter) and you doodle over their face, blacking out teeth, adding devil horns and the such. From this sprouted the idea of fridge magnets, in the same vain as magnetic poetry and letters. I felt this concept was strong as it presented whimsy in a couple of ways. Firstly, taking boring objects (fridge, photos of boring people) and making them whimsical. Secondly, you encourage whimsy within yourself as you are using your imagination to create something bizarre and oddly beautiful. At this point I was under the illusion that the magnets alone didn't have enough context. To rectify this I created postcards, that would be put with the magnets, to explain what the magnets were for. Additionally, I made a box to house all of the elements. This box is intentionally meant to seem mundane because the content inside should speak for itself and explode to life. Consider a Pandora's box of whimsy.

I am very pleased with how it came out in the end. I feel that the quality is there, the idea is strong and, as childish as it is, they are very fun to play with.