Monday Afternoon Seminar - Essay

Within this seminar we talked about the essay in more detail, I found that this seminar was very helpful, as it allowed to me to look and choose a essay question that I wanted to answer. I found that choosing an essay question was quite difficult as I wasn't sure, which one that I wanted to choose, this was because I had never been given an essay to write before, I found that this made me really nervous about writing the essay because I wasn't sure whether it would go well or not. However I did find the seminar very helpful, as it boosted my confidence on the essay that I going to be writing.

The question that I decided to take forward to answer for my essay was question number 3, which was about Branding vs Anti-Branding. The question that we were given to answer was:

"Brand versus Anti-Brand. How have graphic designer or animators worked with or against brands and to what effects?"

From this I had to think about what I could write about, as I had to choose a subject to focus the essay on, we were told that it could be something that you are interested in and take a branding perspective on it. Other points that we were told to think about when writing our essay's were to think about the things that have been used/reused? Look into anti-branding and think about the big brother eye for example and how it has been used for logos. Also branding is about our own belonging in some aspects, like how have our hair.  Branding is opinionated and this can be down to the age range etc. We were also told that we could look into McDonalds as a case study, or a big company and use this as a main focus point. We could look at how it has changed over the years from the branding to the menu choices. Another part that we could look at is Adbusters for Anti-branding and how they use McDonalds things to show them up. We were shown that companies pay lawyers to protect there brand these days, which shows that this has changed how the branding world is now than it used to be. 

I thought about how I could look into TV Series, my example for this was to look at the song that had been used for the Pretty Little Liars theme song in the opening sequence. I could look at how the song was sung by a band, but was then used for the theme song. From this you would be able to recognise and think a lot more about the TV Show rather than the band that originally sung the song because the show is very popular and could be recognised anywhere in the world. I also thought about looking into the company Marks and Spencer and how design companies that compete with each other or against each other with supermarkets. For example Tesco, Sainsbury's, Aldi and more. I thought about I looking at the christmas adverts, as I could focus on one but expand out and looking into more.