McKenna Sprouse - 2024
Artist's Statement
For my final project, I was inspired by the class period we had talking about growth. This topic in particular caused me to reflect on my own inpact in the fight for climate change. As I am now entering the workforce as a graphic designer, I realize that I will owe a lot of my future work to capitalism and its biproducts. This is something that I am not sure sits right with me.
However, I do love what I do and think that graphic design can also be a less wasteful way to add value to good businesses. In my schooling we have had a few discussions on such topics as graphic design ethics and sustainable design that I found fairly helpful as I tried to figure out my place in the design world and that is something I want for other perspective designers.
That being said, I used this final project as an opportunity to compile essays on design and consumerism into a cultural zine. A zine is a magazine that is self-published and includes art and literature intentionally curated by the designer.
For my zine I found a lot of great articles by famous designers giving their input for how design relates to our current consumer culture. Some are against consumersim, some pro and a few in between.
I used the elements in my zine intentionally to poke fun at consumerism and lighten the mood a bit. The tag line for my zine is “Breaking the Simulation” and I deliberately made everything inside the magazine look warped and uncomfortable in order to drive home the point that we we are living in a sort of warped, capitalist, simulation designed to make us buy things.
I used the colors red and yellow exculsively in this zine because to me they are the colors of capitalism. The striking red and yellow used by McDonalds does a successful job to grab the attention and yell “buy me!!” I hope that this zine can serve as a place to reflect on the role of graphic designers in the cause of climate change, while providing an unbiast ear to hear all sides to the story.
With luck this will be one of many issues.