One thing that I have latched on to after joining this MA AE program is, ‘I AM A COMPLETE IGNORANT PERSON IN TERMS OF COMMUNICATION LANGUAGES’. That’s right; you have read it just right. I mean I always had this fascination for French and Spanish and I had this pre-conceived notion that yes ‘Languages’ are the only modes of communication that we use while communicating to people around. I wanted to learn these different verbal languages by heart down the road sometime but hold on please, one day I got to know that I have been selected for this Master’s Program and the other day BOOM!! This bombshell dropped on me that there are other languages at work also who help you to converse with your immediate surroundings. That’s right. What if I tell you that I opened this Pandora box and now I have this superpower to actually “communicate” to a lifeless paper? Yes, I never celebrated that as well.
Hola everyone, my name is Afifa Naeem and I’m going to take you to my journey from being a ‘highly’ ignorant to a ‘slightly’ panto-math person.
When I joined this MA AE program, I knew I have signed up for the most interesting journey of my life. I knew that although I am a Product and Industrial design graduate, I’m still ignorant of a bulk of things a designer should never be. So I was quite optimistic since the beginning that I’m going to get recognized with completely different dimensions of art and design field. I will write a separate reflection of my experience so far, but this particular document is to talk about the last assignment that we have done in T&T.
In our last class, we discussed memes in detail. I’m certain everyone must be familiar with it as this medium is quite renowned in social media but what I’m here to talk about is my experience of designing one. My instructor exceptionally explained all the key elements that are required to design a meme and to some extent helped us in understanding the basic definition of it as well. When I said above that I was ignorant of different means of communication, I was referring to a number of assignments that I have done in this program and I even mentioned one of them as well, like when I got to play with paper and ‘communicate’ with it. But that’s the story of a different time; right now I’m going to talk about this other mean of ‘communicating’ that I have been ignorant of.
Since the inception of memes, I always used to consider them a way of conveying a joke or sarcasm. A meme could be made upon anything, I mean it. Every situation whether it’s current, any social issue, emergency issues, world affairs anything could be shown in different light through memes. But what I never comprehended was that they are also one of the means of communicating online. A meme could be a pretty powerful tool to talk about any social issue or current affairs and this is what we were supposed to do when Sir Aarish introduced this assignment.
When I started working on it, at first I was completely unclear about my approach. I didn’t know what topic I should pick, what angle should I work on, nothing. First and foremost, to clear my hazy mind I googled memes and studied as much about them as I can. I searched for popular meme examples and observed the aesthetics, the funny remark, the pairing of words and the overall composition of it. I came across some example of marketing memes and they somehow helped in providing me the certain dimension that I had to work on. Now the final hurdle was to come up with a catchy topic.
The “THAT’S IT!” moment for me was when I saw this Whatsapp story of my friend .It was her portrait in a Vogue cover template. I got curious because I have been following this “Vogue Challenge” trend on Facebook and Instagram where people have been uploading their pictures in the same Vogue Cover template. I decided to search for it. My research told me that this trend initially started on Tiktok after the hastag ‘Black Lives Matter’ went viral. Anna Wintour, the editor in chief of Vogue, wrote this letter which stated that Vogue has never given the appreciation to their black personnel as they should have.
After that letter, this trend went viral on different social platforms where people started uploading their pictures with this Vogue Cover Template. Now I know that this is a serious social issue but the way people on social media have started using this template for ‘fun’, this game me the idea to develop the meme on it.
There are hundred things around us which are never appreciated rightly. So I thought why not bring them to the limelight. So I started searching for the most overlooked things in our surroundings and I developed these two memes.
So this meme that I have designed shows how unappreciated and overlooked this loaf of bread is that we normally call the ‘heel’ or the ‘crust. I went for the sarcastic yet funny approach to come up with this meme showing that how general public just gets associated to any trend, never knowing the actual story behind it. Half of the public using this trend doesn’t know that the backstory of this trend was to showcase the Black individuals working at the back end who were never applauded for their work.
So, in a way, by designing this meme, I feel that I have conversed with people around and have imparted this message that there is always a backstory to every trend and an effort should be made to know about it before being a part of it. Of course there is no harm in contributing to any trend neither I’m suggesting that it’s socially wrong. Consider this just an exertion from a former ‘highly’ ignorant person who just wants to put her ‘new’ communication skills at work and wants to communicate.
Tools & Technology in Art Education 