Concept Explorations

Here are some concepts that communicate a liberation theme of the coffee workers using a combination of imagery, hand drawn patterns and other sketches. From the feedback given, they need more texture and more treatment to the images, which may just be a matter of playing around with the colouring or cropping it in a different way.

Imagery Development - Patterns

These are some of the patterns that i first drew in my workbook, then scanned into illustrator and live traced them, also touched them up on photoshop. I was inspired by Ethiopian, and South American patterns and markings as these are the places that are the main source of coffee. The choice of colour could also further represent this in the patterns.  

Fair trade research

Fairtrade research to go towards the body copy.

Coffee is big business and remains one of the most valuable primary products in world trade. However, for many of the world’s 25 million coffee farmers, coffee is a labour intensive crop that frequently yields very little financial return.

Coffee is also enormously valuable to the economies of many developing countries.  For some of the world’s Least Developed Countries, such as Burundi, the cultivation of coffee accounts for the majority of foreign exchange earnings, up to 80%.  Most of the coffee-dependent workers worldwide are in developing countries, especially Brazil, Vietnam, Colombia, Indonesia and Mexico, the largest exporters of coffee.

The history of coffee on the world market has always been characterized by its high price volatility.  This volatility prompted international governments to negotiate the first International Coffee Agreement to stabilize the coffee market in 1962.  Quotas were introduced so that excessive coffee supplies were withheld from the market and coffee consumption was promoted.

Fairtrade Standards for coffee act as a safety net against the unpredictable market. They provide security to coffee producers so that they will get a price that covers their average costs of sustainable production.

Fairtrade coffee producers are small family farms organized in cooperatives or associations which the farmers own and govern democratically.

Fairtrade Impact: 

The Fairtrade Premium is the sum of money paid on top of the agreed price for investment in social, environmental or economic development projects that meet the needs of producer groups.

Neknasi achieved Fairtrade Certification in May of 2011, and in December 2011, they received AUD 8,000 in Fairtrade Premium. The Board members report that Neknasi is developing a plan to use its first Fairtrade Premium to expand and improve its current water supply system to include coffee gardens close to members’ villages. In the near future, the cooperative will increase production levels as a result of their recent vehicle purchase and improvements in sustainable farm management practices such as weeding and pruning. The Board also reports that Neknasi has plans to increase association membership.  

Currently, Neknasi’s only export crop is coffee, however it is developing its vanilla production and hopes to export vanilla under Fairtrade Certification in the future.

In the future Neknasi plan to use the Premium to invest in the following problem areas::

•   High levels of illiteracy among farmers due to expensive school fees and the remote location of primary and secondary schools.

•   Endemic health issues such as malaria and complications during childbirth, and the corresponding  lack of sufficient medical supplies and convenient health centres.

•   Remote mountainous locations, which translate into high transport costs, lower prices to producers, and difficulties in achieving access to markets.

concept explorations

after looking at inspiration from collage design that have a naturalistic feel I have created a few mock up compositions. These concepts involve the idea of liberation along with themes of fair trade and coffee in general.

First attempt. 

does not have enough relation to liberation

Second attempts

Portraying spilt coffee as blood, using the rhetoric of satire

Liberation of workers is the main theme with emphasis on south america as country of origin

Involving ethnic pattern and the liberation symbol growing out of the coffee plant

Development

These are some drawings that have been scanned in and live traced on illustrator to smooth the edges and just get an overall better result. They are visuals that can be used in our montage style designs to represent liberation (liberate coffee workers). 

Montage inspiration

These are some montage type examples that we have been looking at as a source of inspiration. The overall handcrafted/ rough, free style will work well with the fair trade topic, to give that natural vibe. The use of doodles, line work, saturation of images and the overlay of shapes makes for interesting compositions that can be applied consistently across the different forms of media.   

Developing Concepts

Here is another rough concept, using the same image of the spray can below as a style reference. The idea behind the concept is that someone else's future is in your hands- it is in your choice of coffee. Text and images that represent the coffee workers' future have been used, however the imagery does need to be a lot stronger to have more impact.

refined concept image

Using inspiration from this image here we have created one concept that shows the idea of liberation through the fist contrasted with the ethnic pattern that reflects the countries of origin where the coffee originates from.

Inspiration image

Concept image, Black illustration

Orange illustration

Red illustration

Initial Concepts/Ideas

Couple of pictures showing some of our initial ideas of visual representations of our topic using different rhetoric devices such as substitution, juxtaposition, pastiche e.t.c

 

idea imagery

The idea we have adopted for our rhetoric approach is the liberation of worker in the coffee industry. here we will highlight how fair-trade can improve the lives of the people who produce the coffee beans and also show the negative effects of not buying fair-trade coffee. To help with producing ideas we are researching imagery surrounding liberation: