Daniel George Mckoy

About the work

Images 1 & 2. Branding and Advertising Campaign: “Mental Health Being Hidden Under the Autism Spectrum”.

My brief required me to choose a contemporary topic of my choice. I chose to raise awareness of the mental health and wellbeing of autistic people.

Influenced by a self-portrait filled texture, I used Photoshop to confine my self-portraits to my jigsaw pattern and my stock imagery to my lino printed jigsaw puzzles, with a 3D jigsaw piece filled with my self-portrait to see how the images looked under textures. But to refine the fictional exhibition artwork into final pieces, I added more 3D jigsaw pieces with other fictional autistic people concealing their emotions to imitate my topic, with an autistic infinity symbol. I also blurred the jigsaw puzzle for viewers to focus on the isolated jigsaws.

I considered refining my first experiments into exhibition posters. I replaced the painted jigsaw with a lino printed jigsaw to create a coherent brand across my exhibition artwork and series of posters. I used a typeface Amatic, inspired by my research into a teenage autistic programme’s text design.

 Image 3. Live Project: Key4Life Knife Crime Awareness Campaign.

My brief from a charity called Key4Life required me to create a text-based campaign using either a statistic or a compelling story. This was to encourage young people to turn away from knife crime and do better things with their life.

I found out from surveys conducted that 83.3% of 10–17-year-olds feel unsafe outside with their friends. So, I used Photoshop and Illustrator to experiment with partial erasion, slices and reversed colour of “unsafe outside with their friends” to illustrate the statistic.

I then went onto slice the phrase equally at and in different directions. I liked the second slicing idea and decided to choose it as my final poster with blood since it had more movement that reflected a knife being thrown away and the angle of the plunge.

Images 4 & 5. Editorial Design Project: Skatebordas Magazine.

I was required to choose a piece of editorial design based on a chosen topic. Illustrator and Graphic Designer Doug Rodas’ grayscale photography and his handwritten text in his redesigned magazine inspired me to also design a magazine exploring the media.

I named my brand identity Skatebordas to reflect young people using abbreviations when communicating.

For my magazine layout explorations, I played with having black text on white on the first page and the opposite on the right page and vice versa, with and without a skateboarder layered over a large S of skate etc. To effectively respond to the topic, I broken the article title influenced by Designer Luke Williams slicing and replaced a skateboarder, with a mixed media illustrated skateboarder. This effectively communicated broken bones from skateboarding injuries from disregarding safety gear. Therefore, I chose this as my final piece. Eleanor Shakespeare’s drips inspired the spraypaint and her collages inspired me to include a collage for my article and Designer Martin Venezky’s layering inspired me to layer a plaster over my collage.