Greenland's Tears

I am generally satisfied with the final presentation of my project Greenland’s Tears. However, this does not mean that the design process was without any problem. In what follows, I will analyse the reasons for the different decisions I made and the challenges I encountered, using the stages of the project as a reference.

Firstly, I spent an inordinate amount of time in the initial research of the project. The reasons for this were, on the one hand, poor time management, i.e. my inability to allocate the time needed for both the thesis and the climate crisis project at the same time, which directly contributed to the rushed timing of the project. Had I had more time to allocate to the creative phase, I would have ended up with more than one finished illustration. This reminds me to take advance planning and subsequent strict execution of the plan into account for future projects. On the other hand, I hesitated too long in the research process. Because the subject of the climate crisis is so varied, I did extensive research early on in the project, but it was superficial. This led me to come up with a number of different developable concepts, but none of them were detailed enough. This indirectly led to difficulties in moving some of the concepts forward in the subsequent creation. However, I then combined two of the existing concepts according to my overall feeling for the theme and settled on a final idea, which I think worked. This also shows that I need to be less hesitant in my future research periods of other projects.

I also encountered a number of challenges during the design process. The main one was the illustration style. When drawing the sketches, I experimented with different textures to draw the glacial elements related to the theme. During this process, I learned about the artwork of Japanese manga artist Haruko Ichikawa, which gave me the inspiration to experiment with graphic style and variations of black and white in my own illustration. I eventually settled on a reference to this manga artist's style because I wanted to position my work as a design-led but relatively realistic visual. But then, on the advice of my tutor Mr. Huffam, I decided on green and blue as the main colours, which come from our planet and oceans associated with the theme. Although the content of the sketches was not directly used in this work, I think these attempts will form the basis for other projects in the future.

Finally, there are two aspects that I have thought about to make this project better: one is the image itself, where I am personally most satisfied with the falling waves and the coral reef under the sea, both of which basically meet my expectations. What needs to be enhanced is the urban building section, the final result of it is relatively plain and I would consider changing its shape if it could be adjusted. The other is an extension of what this project could have: a small hourglass-shaped device, which could have been a simpler version of the illustration's content.