As part of this unit we were required to do complete two live projects to help us gain more understanding into encoding and decoding advertisements to a tight deadline. "Spend more save less" was the title of the first project. During this project we had to work in small groups to create an ad to help encourage people to spend more in order to help the declining economy recover. We started off by looking into existing ads and offers within magazines and papers. After discussing and creating some initial ideas we agreed on our final design. We took ideas from Mastercard logos and expanded them for a final, slightly comical ad. (see link above)
Black box was the other live project within the unit. This required more group and was also to a tight deadline of one day. Each group chose an envelope from a box, in which contained an existing logo. Our group ended up with Colgate Total. After much research in the library and ideas discussion we encoded our brand within a semiotic message- "Colgate Total". We then received an encoded message from another group after giving ours away. All the groups were then required to decode there given hidden brand. When decoded we had to create an advertisement; our encoded brand was Gillette Mac 3.
Our design was based on the history of Gillette; we wanted to take the stereotypical view of over the top razor adverts away, and put in more of a trustworthy and traditional aspect to our ad. Final Design
