OUGD501 Module Evaluation

At the beginning of the Context of Practice module I feel that my written skills needed a bit of brushing up, I now feel after completing my essay and the tasks that they have improved slightly.  I think that writing my essay on something that I was actually interested in definitely helped as I often struggle with essay writing.  I have also developed my inDesign and photoshop skills slightly as I often just use illustrator.  I now feel more confident in both programs.
Throughout the practical side of the module I had a go at making my own recycled homemade paper, as originally I was going to put it in my publication, however I changed my concept, but now I know how to make paper which is a skill I feel that I will probably use in the future as I enjoy craft based art.  
I feel that for this project did a lot of development work and research before diving straight into designing which helped me to make informed decisions about my work.  I found the practical side of the module quite difficult as normally when designing there isn't as much theoretical content to consider and deliver however I feel like I achieved what I wanted to achieve within my publication.  In the future I will seek out help sooner if I need it, rather than just worrying and this will help me to keep on working instead of worrying.  Also in the future I intend to be stricter with myself when it comes to deadlines and intend to do lots of research for COP3 over the summer so that I am not behind at all when I start 3rd year.

COP Publication // The Sexual Revolution

The Final Design:

Sexual Revolution Printed Publication

Sexual Revolution Final Publication

 

The relevance of the legs here is to illustrate further the fact the book is about the sexual revolution.  Also the introduction of the mini-skirt.

On the left is my hand-painted sign in the style of the Hippie Protest Signs of the Sixties scanned in and edited to fit in with the style of the publication.  'The true drug of the sixties' the pill kick started the sexual revolution.  The yellow dotted background represents lots and lots of little contraceptive pills.  It does not matter if this is not obvious because it has a good effect which is similar to effects I have seen in design in my research.

I have written previously about what this quote means and where it came from.  The image is duo toned and I think it works much better like this as it isn't as distracting from the information on the right.  The use of pink emphasises the fact this book is more about women's liberation and women's troubles.

The quote on the left is the beginning of where I begin to talk more about how the Sexual Revolution wasn't all free love and flowers.

Women Against Pornography March in the seventies showed a change in attitude towards sex.

This image of Virginia Ironside I have edited from the original which I took from an article.  The fuzzy almost blocked out face gives the lady some privacy.  

A few quotes which inform about the problems which we now face today due to sex not being handled as delicately as it could have been.

A female fighting for free contraception and abortion.  When this was legalised Birth rates did actually drop.

Edited Photos // Sexual Revolution

Below are the images which I have edited in photoshop so they fit in with the style of my publication.  I never normally use photoshop and I may have gone a bit mad with the effects you can use but managed to try and keep only necessary themed images in my publication.

Halftone Pattern

Duo - Tone

Sexual Revolution // Experimental Photographs

'Put the Love back in Love-making'

Feminist posters, hopefully they will make people take a step back and think about what sex is really about.

 

'Good girls go to heaven, bad girls go everywhere' - quote by Helen Gurley Brown, author of Sex and the Single Girl (published in the sixties, this book helped start the sexual revolution for women) and long time editor of Cosmopolitan Magazine.  People like this and quotes like this encouraged women to sleep around and generally disobey the strict lifestyle of earlier times.

I also took a few sneaky shots of my sign outside and inside Ann Summers as it is the perfect illustration of female sexual freedom.

I thought that taking pictures of my sign inside Ann Summers with the mannequins dressed in bondage gear would illustrate what the sign was saying.  As I only had a short amount of time and the awful lighting instore the photo's did not turn out quite as I desired but was still fun attempting to get some good shots.

Last Season of Innocence: The Teen Experience in the 1960s

 Reading the part about teen magazines of this google book helped me while researching for my essay.


http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=XOdc1GEgRcIC&pg=PA105&lpg=PA105&dq=teenage+magazines+in+the+sixties&source=bl&ots=NQGGfQ3tHw&sig=ihPmVat3kEjVfvrhdtKM2_6ze1E&hl=en&sa=X&ei=HqWOUYmuHuib1AWHxIDAAg&ved=0CHIQ6AEwDQ#v=onepage&q=teenage%20magazines%20in%20the%20sixties&f=false

Sexual Revolution Publication

I decided to create signs in the style of protest placards which were so common amongst protesters against the Vietnam War in the sixties.  Below is an image of a sign which I have painted on birch plywood and scanned into the computer and then edited from there.  I intend my other signs to be photographed in context.

 

Here I have layered over a low opacity block of pink so the anesthetic fits in more with the overall style of the book.

Feminism // Sexual Revolution

In my book I want to include some information about feminism and how gradually after they had gained sexual liberation, they began to fight against it in a way.  A good example of this is fighting against pornography as feminists believed it encouraged men to hurt women.  It also gave men a false idea of what women look and act like in the bedroom.  Another example is the heartbreak that sleeping around caused and the loss of meaning in sex.  

As I think this is still a problem today with young people sleeping around I decided to make some posters in the style of how the protests signs were made in the sixties.  This poster features the feminist symbol and I came up with the slogan myself.  

I have now dotted many of these around hyde park.  Unfortunately I think the owner of a property where I plastered rather a lot must have taken them down.  I would have liked to guage peoples reactions to these posters. 

Real Living: Sex in the Sixties

This article gives four womens stories of what the sixties was really like.  This will help feed into my publication to prove that it wasn't just all about free love and flowers.

What was it, exactly, about the Sixties? Could they really have lived up to their reputation as the decade of liberation, revolution, peace and flower power? 
 
A new series from Channel 4 which starts this week re-examines the sexual revolution, from the Sixties through to the Nineties. Below, four who lived through the beginning of this great change recall their Sixties experiences. It wasn't all free love and flower power, especially outside the big cities: the repressive hangover of the Fifties still lingered for many years.
Even so, all four of our interviewees are emphatic: they wouldn't swop their twenties in the Sixties for any other decade.

MAUREEN FLANAGAN, model:

"I was educated in a convent till I was 15, then I became a hairdresser. When I was 17 I started going out with my future husband - he would wait for me outside the shop, and we'd go dancing or to the pictures and get the bus home. In those days, if anyone wanted to dance with you he had to ask your boyfriend's permission first.

"We'd kiss and cuddle on the doorstep but I was terrified to do anything more - though the boys used to go with other girls, ones who'd say 'yes', and a few of the boys got caught out. I was a virgin when we got married in 1961 - I was 20. I was terrified on my wedding night. I remember thinking 'Is that it?'

"I loved films and it wasn't like it was in the films, I didn't start enjoying it for months and months. I started modelling in the first year of our marriage - I'm extremely photogenic, thank god. I went to an agency, started on the catwalk, then went on to photographic stuff - I was the first Page 3 model - then into television.

"Well, my husband didn't agree with that! I stayed with him ten years - these days I'd have left within 18 months. But I was breaking out every one of those years; the fashion, the music and my job really changed me. We were a generation that was the product of the Fifties - all those dull clothes. No wonder we wanted to be flower children.

"My skirts went from knee-length to nine inches. All my friends who'd got married at the beginning of the Sixties were changing too, but our husbands stayed the same: same jobs, same suits, same straightlaced attitude - my husband would be out digging up the roads in the day and he'd be back at five wanting his dinner on the table.

"A lot of marriages broke up at the end of the Sixties. We were more free than young people today. They laugh and say they can do what they want, but I think there's lots of pressure on them. We were all working; today there's unemployment and boredom.

"I wouldn't want to be 20 now when I see kids outside the jobcentre or queueing up to be first on the list for a flat - that didn't happen in the Sixties. We took LSD and purple hearts, but I know people who were on purple hearts who are granddads now: today you see kids on smack and coke. The Sixties totally changed women, we became our own people. We came out of the Sixties independent."

GAVIN HODGE, hairdresser:

"There were two phases to the Sixties: pre-pill and post-pill. My sister, who was growing up in the late Fifties, didn't have half the freedom: if you got into trouble back then, you had to get married or you ended up down a backstreet with a coathanger. Then the pill came along - it gave women the freedom to be the equal of their boyfriends. There was a lot of moral debate at the time but, as far as I could gather, most girls couldn't care less about that: they just wanted to get their hands on it. We smoked a bit of dope, did a bit of acid, but the major drug of the Sixties was the pill.
"The Sixties was a time to achieve: you could achieve anything. There were so many of us born just after the war - there was such a wave, a push forward, it was freedom. England and London were still shaking down from a horrendous period and it was down to belief in oneself, wanting to get something better.

"I came to London when I was 15. I started work in a hairdresser's in 1960 when the first mod era was going on - there was the music, the clothes, London was being rebuilt. First I was a beatnik, then I progressed to being a mod - I'm a clothes freak; it's the peacock bit.
"I had a scooter, it went with the scene - the Lyceum, the Locarno, all the big clubs. I was arrested after the first CND rally. We were aware of the bomb and there was this perception that there were a lot of trigger- happy loonies out there - it was the only thing that worried us."

MAUREEN DELENIAN, mature student:

"I left school in 1956, I got married and had three children very close together; I was horrified when I fell pregnant again. I would have had four children under the age of five, and my husband was setting up his own business so we had sold our house and we were living with his partner, so we were homeless, too.

"I was about 25, I wasn't a skittish teenager, but I was desperate and knew I couldn't cope, so I decided to do my own abortion. The first time it didn't work, so then I had the added thought that if I went ahead with the pregnancy I might have damaged the foetus; the second time, it worked but I haemorrhaged massively and came as close to death as you can get.

"The 1967 abortion act was the event of the Sixties as far as I'm concerned. I don't think the decade lived up to its flower-power reputation. I'm studying history now, and I had to go back and read about what happened in 1968 even though I lived through it. It made no difference to me at all."

"The experiences of the Sixties on a grand scale were gradually filtering through because of things like the abortion act and sexual liberation but it wasn't an instant thing at all. I certainly never went to Glastonbury! There were difficult times, but I'd still rather have been young in the Sixties than now. It was a boom period, there wasn't any high unemployment and wages were rising.

"And there were real revolutions going on - eventually it was no longer frowned on to have an abortion, get divorced. You could talk about sex openly. And, the key thing; it was before Aids. What have youngsters got now? They can't know the joy of thinking, 'I'm single, I'm horny, I'm going to get a man' and then doing it.

PAT HOWARTH, housewife:

"I lived in Colne in Lancashire, and flower power didn't get much further than Manchester; we didn't see much free love except on the telly. I came out of grammar school at 15 and went straight to work as a telephonist. I started going out with a boy called Victor; he wasn't my first boyfriend, but he was special. I met him in a club and there was instant chemistry: I went in with another boy, and by the time he got back from the bar, Victor had already asked me out. We went out for two years, it wasn't just a flash in the pan.

"I was 16 when I got pregnant. I told him, but we just left it: my idea was that, being from a good Catholic family, if I hung on we'd get married. I presumed my dad would say we had to, and that would have pleased me. Nobody said a word until I was six months pregnant - in those days, everything would get swept under the carpet - but eventually my mum said to me "Are you going to tell us, or do we have to tell you?

"She said she'd tell my dad and I thought she would sort everything out. Then a fortnight later my dad told me to pack my bags and they took me to St Teresa's, a Catholic home for unmarried girls and their babies. It was a horrible place. My parents visited me and so did Victor.

"I was 17 when my daughter Lisa was born, and by then my mother was very ill herself, with cancer, though they didn't tell me that was what it was. Victor had applied for a place at art college and went off to study; I stayed in the home for five months, much longer than most girls did.

"Then one of the nuns came and told me to pack my bags because I was to go home; I was so pleased, and I dressed Lisa all in white - she looked beautiful. But on the way back, my dad pulled into a driveway; we went inside and two nuns came in and took Lisa away. I don't know why I let them do it, I can't believe it to this day. I think I thought maybe we were just there to fill in some forms or something. I don't remember the journey home, but when we got back I couldn't stop screaming. I tried to find her, but I never saw her again, until she traced me 18 years later.

"The Sixties didn't swing for me; my mother died and I had to look after my younger brothers and sisters, and I was watched like a hawk after that. But it was still a better time. It might not seem like it but our morals were better. There was some romance with sex, sex now is just wham-bam with not even a thank you ma'am.

"And they talk about drugs in the Sixties, but look at the drugs now! We've got a problem in this town on every street corner. And there are no jobs; back then, once I went after four jobs and was offered all four and couldn't decide which to take. There is nothing to look forward to for young people today, no future, and we're not really any more enlightened now than we were then."

http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/real-living-sex-in-the-sixties-1177467.html 

Sexual Revolution Publication // Design

Finally started designing on the computer.  For the publication I have taken inspiration from some these images of front covers of sex - related magazines and publications from the late 60s. 

All images from SEX Press Magazine

I have started off with this image of Hippies showing peace signs as the new ideologies about free love and female liberation was majorly pushed by them.

I have then edited the photo so it has a similar aesthetic to designs of the 1960's.

As the booklet will be A5 I have cropped it to this size.

I then took the image into illustrator and created my own male/female symbols to be placed on top of the image and a small title advising people that the content is about the sexual revolution.  I have left these extras quite faint as I want the main focus to be the image.

COP Publication // Further Research

A Brief history of Hippies

April 4, 2013

Source: Some Killer Stories

In the mid 1960s, a never before seen counter-culture blossomed throughout the United States, inciting both the Flower Power movement as well as the general revulsion of more straight-laced, Ward Cleaver-esque Americans. No longer wanting to keep up with the Joneses or confine themselves to white picket-fenced corrals of repressive and Puritanical sexual norms, these fresh-faced masses would soon come to be known as Hippies.

Source: Family Of Love

Originally taken from ‘Hipster’, the term “hippie” was used to describe beatniks who found their technicolor heart in the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco; children of the road who believed they should make love, not war. Their vocal opposition to the United States’ involvement in the Vietnam War (1955-1975) and the increasingly rocky road to shared civil rights among all Americans led to this new, alternative form of activism.

Source: Gen Fash

Donning psychedelic floral clothing and growing beards that rivaled Rasputin’s in length all became part of the evolving counter-culture. With this also came a new epoch of fashion, film and literature; one which would grow out of the San Francisco valley and spill into the daily lives of the masses at home and abroad within the span of a couple of years.

 

Source: All History

But the Hippie movement wasn’t just about experimentation and trouser flares. As mentioned previously, the concept of Flower Power also emerged as a passive resistance to the Vietnam War during the late 1960s. The beat poet Allen Ginsberg coined the expression in 1965 as a way for people to turn war into peace.

 

Source: Historicus Inc.

To give physical meaning to one poet’s vision, hippies cloaked themselves in floral fabrics and would dole flowers out to both the public and soldiers alike. Through this, they became known as flower children, singing and smiling activists who used props to turn anti-war rallies into guerrilla street theatre across the States. The most famous demonstrations were carried out by the Bread and Puppet Theatre Company, whose members crafted elaborate costumes for the rallies.

 

Source: Flickr

Perhaps one of the most poignant moments of the movement was on October 21st, 1967. 100,000 hippies, liberals and others marched peacefully on the Pentagon in an attempt to levitate it. They were met with a human barricade of 2,500 soldiers surrounding the Pentagon. And soon enough, violence erupted when the more radical protestors clashed with US Marshals. The protest lasted for almost three days before order was restored.

 

Source: Sarah Luna Dear

To further promote their pacifist cause, some placed flowers in the barrels of the soldiers’ guns while others made daisy chains. Clearly, the recent words of activist Abbie Hoffman remained in their consciousness. In a May Workshop in Nonviolence magazine, she wrote: “The cry of ‘Flower Power’ echoes through the land. We shall not wilt. Let a thousand flowers bloom.”

 

Source: Google

But by the mid-1970s, the hippie movement began to slow. After all, the US was out of Vietnam, civil rights had at least formally been acquired, and, well, the yuppies had arrived. Young urban professionals who wanted to make a career for themselves began to occupy more national attention and thus the social libertarianism of the hippies took on a more symbolic role. 


http://all-that-is-interesting.com/a-brief-history-of-hippies