12-16 is the age you are in high school are are introduced to sex, relationship education. I feel this would be the best group to target with my project but aim for the lower ages 12-13 to introduce the idea of gender fluidity as early as possible.
The initial brand identity experiments I produced for the campaign were very formal and targeted an older and mature audience. My more focused audience means the brand identity needed refining to be more appropriate and friendly feeling.
I decided to keep with the idea of a circle becoming fluid and escaping its own boundaries; but I felt a hand rendered approach was more personal, friendly and appealing to a younger audience. I felt the online platform previously explored was still an appropriate element to create as many young people use the internet as their main source of information and personal advice. So designing something more engaging, interactive and kinetic to keep young people's attention and inform them visually would be a good approach.
I then produced this moving logo design depicting the circle becoming fluid and open; it's my visual representation of people discovering themselves and their gender identity.
I also began experimenting with bright and colourful illustrative images that used the same friendly and casual approach to the topic. This in particular addressing the idea that colours are associated to gender and that people are instantly defined as either male or female at birth and assigned either blue or pink. (Yellow is known as the neutral colour for babies gender; this could be something to work with in the overall brand identity).
Because the campaign is aimed at an age range starting at 12 it needs to cover all basic elements regarding gender. The main aim being to show gender as a spectrum rather than a black and white social construction.
I created this simple gif visually showing how there is so much space in between male and female that people can identify as; before even considering that you could be born and categorised as one gender but be another in your mind.
Thinking back to the target audience and this being a step in expanding individual's knowledge in between childhood and adulthood I wanted the overall aesthetic to speak to this and be friendly and recognisable. I decided using brightly coloured scribbly style illustration throughout would be well informed by this.
This is an adaptation of the logo gif using the scribble effect aesthetic as a subtle background- it links well with the initial hat illustrations I produced also.
Content research
I came across this website that offers lesson plans for teachers introducing the idea of gender fluidity to teenagers. It has lots of great sources of information and fictional stories on the topic that will be helpful to me and my campaign.
http://www.advocatesforyouth.org/for-professionals/lesson-plans-professionals/217?task=view
A girl with no name
I was perhaps 15 years old. The rest of the family had gone on a ride, and I had begged off; the excuse is long forgotten. I was sitting on the floor of the living room, wearing a purple dress (I had my own by that time), experimenting with my face. And for the first time, I got it right. Looking in the mirror, with my mandatory haircut, I would ordinarily see a boy, and only a boy. In that dress, with Cover Girl skin and Maybelline eyes, my hair blended into a wig, I saw a very pretty, an almost beautiful girl. I didn't—and this is important—see a boy dressed as a girl. I saw a girl!
I remember thinking, "This is who I want to be. This is who I probably should have been." But I also remember thinking that it couldn't be. I was looking at a fiction, a fabrication, a creature created out of cosmetics and cloth. The girl in the mirror was a fantasy, and I could see no way to make her a reality. The girl had no name. In the end, she wound up in a paper sack which I hid under a loose board in the summer-hot attic.
My parents took me to a psychiatrist… In my shame and denial, I led him to think that the crossdressing was not very important, had just been an experiment. And he went for it, telling my parents that I was "just going through a phase." It's a phase that's still going on, now, at age 46. I entered adulthood as a man instead of as a woman… Married a woman; grew a beard; went to college. Got weak in the knees every time I saw a pretty girl, because I wanted to be her so much. Got divorced (for unrelated reasons).
I started by acknowledging that I was at the very least a crossdresser. I quit worrying that my pumps or wig would be seen, or that I would be spotted wearing them. One by one, I told my friends and acquaintances. Step one…
Step two was to ask myself whether I wanted to be a woman. I already knew the answer to that one.
Step three was to take an honest look at myself, to determine if it would be possible, via surgery, electrolysis, and better living through chemistry, to ever pass convincingly as a woman. I refused to be a man-in-dress. I took careful stock of my body. I didn't at all like what I saw. My body had moved in undesirable directions since the day I found that single hair growing on my face. I was too hairy, too big, too this, not enough of that. I made a list and then scratched off things that could be changed via hard work, hormones, electrolysis, surgery. I looked at what was left and thought, "Just maybe…"
The girl-with-no-name now has a name. It is, in fact, the name she had all along, one of those names which turns out to work perfectly well as a woman's name, thank you. She is finally a creature of flesh-and-blood rather than a fantasy. She is not a notion of a woman, not an imitation of a woman, not a man's idea of what a woman should be, but a woman, with all the virtues and warts, the rights and privileges thereto—a woman who can be raped, who can be strong, who can bake a cake and change the spark plugs in her car. It is she who I see in the mirror every morning instead of the burr-headed boy I once was. Finally, at long last, thank God, it's over.
I think using this story and few other similar examples within the campaign would be a good thing to include. It allows teenagers to consider gender from the perspective of a complete stranger; they can then think about how they feel about it from a personal angle.
