(B1) RAISA'S INITIAL IDEAS

 1. PHOTOGRAPHY

The first idea for hands on work was to use actual images / photography in the poster designs to emulate the idea that these symptoms and this disorder is very real and very painful to bear. A screenshot from a while ago was used in the way to visualise the 'fear of abandonment' poster. These were all my words so they are honest words from a genuine time where I was going into panic mode because whatever time my partner was not spending time with me was felt as immediate rejection. (Which is the nature of the disorder- any form of rejection feels like abandonment, something as simple as not replying fast enough or not wanting to do a specific activity together or even just when your partner is too busy for you. The mind warps this negatively and it's not something we can usually control at all.)

I approached this first by having a lot of minimal space to communicate the feelings of chronic emptiness, but also used a black and white colour palette as a symptom of pattern of Borderlines is black and white / all or nothing thinking (which is often called splitting). The type in the poster was warped to mimic the concept of how Borderlines suffer from warped misconceptions of reality - dissociation from reality and the inability to sense or feel real. A lot of beliefs of the self are warped. 

I also wanted to try to use actual figures and statistics in the poster. I used the statistic of how 5.5% of the population are Borderlines, however because 5.5pt is too small for text, I made it 50.5pt for the titles. For the smaller descriptive text, I used the percentage of 3% of Borderlines usually complete suicide and made it 30pt. I liked using these references as it felt the poster then had more reference to not just visualised feelings, but actual numbers and facts when it came to the disorder. I tried the text size adjustment with the warped text as I did like the warped feeling, it gave the poster more 'personality' ironically enough that it's about a personality disorder.

2. TYPE BASED COLLAGE

For the second initial idea, I wanted to play around with some collage elements. I printed the title of our campaign which we agreed would be 'Living with BPD' as it sounded more personal than 'Symptoms of BPD' which didn't have a personal touch to the it. I wanted to convey the many feelings of BPD, and to do so I first brainstormed the main core symptoms and feelings of BPD that I myself have gone through and with previous research done.

The main keywords that stuck out were unstable, unpredictable, splitting, and dissociation. And so, I wanted to communicate these with the collages - one way to do so was to squish the words together and show that they were overlapping the way our emotions do in BPD. Varying kerning was used as well to really show the idea of unpredictability and instability of BPD; I felt this was very vividly and successfully shown in the collages. I also cut some of the phrases in half as can be seen in the first collage, to show the idea of splitting.The second collage emphasised the feelings of instability more and the words were more broken to also show the idea of not feeling connected. This collage was much stronger in showing that side of the disorder whereas the first one seems more tight, but also shows the idea of feeling overwhelmed with emotions. These two were thus very different in that. The last collage was mostly torn by hand and squished together to highlight the intensity of emotions but wasn't as successful as the first two.

3. TYPE COLLAGE + MANIPULATIING TYPE

I took the collage type and experimented it with more type manipulation and some hand done illustrations. At first I was focusing on the idea of space to emphasise the feeling of abandonment. This led to very minimal pieces. I used pastels to draw and scanned them in as I liked the rough texture it had, giving it an aggressive feeling that is very attached to BPD. The type which describes the symptoms essentially is manipulated in a way each word is communicating the meaning of itself. This was simple and I rather liked the way it looked. With the illustrations I tried to think of ways to show extreme attachment to avoid abandonment, and mostly played around with this idea of a mess of lines clinging to a ball - it was very profound as an image itself but could be confusing with what it means.

I scratched the idea of using minimal space bc ultimately, what I wanted to communicate was the feelings of living with BPD and this specific symptom. For the chronic emptiness symptom, minimal designs would make sense, but when it comes to fear of abandonment it's a really strong intense fear that can fuel panic attacks, suicidal ideation (which it almost always does), overwhelming self hatred, self harm, and self sabotage. Essentially, its a plethora of emotions that are all overwhelming and overlapping each other - a lot of internal conversations that it becomes hard to function because so much is going on. So, I decided to fill up the whole poster with the type and have small leading in the description too, to really emulate the feelings over intense attachment due to fear of abandonment and the overwhelming emotions. I feel this was much more successful in capturing the emotions and symptoms.