OUGD503 - Roses Awards - Spread The Word - Keep Calm and Carry On

The Brief

Many great new words, or neologisms, have been classified as ‘non-words’ as they have not yet made it into the Oxford English Dictionary. Rumour has it, these words have been consigned to dusty obscurity and have been written on 6x4inch cards, filed alphabetically in a secret vault in Oxford owned by the Oxford University Press. Your task is to help these words find there way into common usage, enabling them to achieve their ultimate goal of a place in the Oxford English Dictionary. You can choose one or more ‘non-words’ or even create your own.

My Interpretation

Having read all the briefs on the Roses Student Awards page, this brief stood out to me because of the highlighted sentence above. Clearly they see this brief as something that you can have some fun with judging by their sarcastic/light-hearted tone, and that's something I appreciate.

There is one word on their shortlist of suggested words that particularly caught my attention because of this link.

Nonversation: a completely pointless chat.

Living in a student rented house with three other art students, and having grown up with two younger siblings, I consider myself to be quite the expert on "Nonversation". From this point on I won't be capitalising it, italicising it, or putting it in quotation/speech marks, as for the sake of the project it should be treated the same as any other word, I will also be adding it to my laptops dictionary. 

I feel that this brief has great potential for me to show my personality in my work, weather this is a good thing or not remains to be seen.

Initial Intentions

Conversation is important. Nonversation is not. This slight change makes a big difference. In graphic design terms, this reminds me greatly of how the keep calm and carry on poster has been stripped of it's integrity as something that was once of great importance to something that is now as meaningless yet big  a part of society as nonversation itself.

Christmas is coming up, a time where family is forced upon one another and meaningless small talk is in no short supply. Over the next few weeks I'll be documenting pointless things that have been said by people I'm close too, and I intend to use these to create a series of posters that reduce the idea of conversation to nonversation, using the way that the keep calm and carry on poster has been reduced from something that once provided national optimism to nothing more than pastiche as inspiration.

   

   

The examples are seemingly endless...