Saturday 30 December 2017

Using Microsoft Word to create Visual Poetry

The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas

I made 3 visual poetries to visualise the short story 'The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas'. 

The first design I created visualises the end of the short where people realised the truth about the wealth of the city and decided to leave Omelas. I represented people leaving by creating an open gate as it can show them walking away from the city and away from the truth that they are guilty of knowing. 

The second design I made is the visualisation of the door of the cellar that the child is locked in. It can also be interpreted as a metaphor for how people 'lock' their thought of the child in the cellar and choose their happiness instead of the saving the child. A closed door can also mean preventing people from coming in or out (in this case the child is locked away) and preventing the child to have a right to freedom. 


The third design I made is a visualisation of what the kid may have looked like. Le Guin did not specify the gender and looks of the child, therefore I made a silhouette of the design. The design can also represent how the child is unknown and doesn't have a presence in the city and the people don't really know the truth about him, until they seek it out themselves. 


The Lottery

The first design I created for 'The Lottery' is the representation of the black box. I choose the black box as it is very significant in the tradition of the town and how it is used to pick the person who gets stoned. It's also significant as it's shown in the story how it is kept in different places throughout the year showing just how much the people in the town deem it as very important in their ritual. Therefore, I think designing the box would be enough in order to show what the story is about for the book cover without giving git all away but not misguide the reader.


The second design I made is visual representation of the paper with the black dot. Again, similar to the box, it is also a very if not the most important part of the story as it is the item which was used in order to choose who is getting stoned, therefore I think it will be effective to use it as a book cover design.


For the third design, I tried to represent the 'mob mentality' of the people and how they act as a group in order to do the ritual. I also included the two the story was based on (North Bennington, Vermont) as I thought it would be interesting as it can lead the readers to also visualise the story based on the town. I thought of representing the groups as the outline of the map surrounding the circle in the middle which is 'Tessie' the person in the middle of the circle who was chosen to get stoned. 


2B R 0 2B

For '2B R 0 2B' I decided to use more symbols and numbers as it can be associated to the title of the book itself. 

The first design I made is to represent the seemingly perfect population America has due to the cure of ageing, and them having to control the population of the country. I used 2 as it's one of the divisors which make a perfect number '6', linking back to a perfect world; and it's also the first number of the title. I left the end of the sequence blank three spaces to represent the three people who died in the story.
The second design also has a similar idea to my first design. I used dots to create 'perfect' rows and columns with three comma's breaking the sequence which represents the three people sacrificed for the triplets in the story. Using the symbols may interest the readers when they see the book cover as it doesn't totally give the story away. 

I used the letter 'O' for my third design as it is a closed counter letter form which can represent the control the FTB has over the population of the country, as they try and not exceed the limits hat they set. However, having the defender of the letterform 'opened' can represent the sacrifice people have to make in order to make way for future generations of the country by having suicide. 
So far, i think I've generated okay ideas which I can further develop. However, I think I have to think more conceptually about my designs as all three books don't have a specific object that they have in common that I can use, but rather having the same concept of 'sacrifice'. I think I will need to think more about what designs I can make in order to effectively express sacrifice and scapegoatism for each book which also ties all of them together in order for it to work as a set.

No comments:

Post a Comment