I Think I May Be Developing Toothache.

Welcome to the sparkly new blog I've created specifically for the third module. That's right, I'm jumping on the 'whatever is suggested in class goes' bandwagon, I'm selling out, I'm becoming Lord Haw Haw.

That aside, how's about some of the work I've been cracking on with? Well, last week were were given the choice of doing either this months' 'Don't Panic' poster, or a postcard competition for Cog. I went with the Don't Panic brief in the end, this month's theme being 'Pure'. [As soon as I heard that word I thought 'how can I manipulate this..?']

I started off looking at what different takes I could go with, I thought of sex, things like virginity, paedophillia, sex exploitation and the like, I thought of water, it's purity and how we take it for granted, I thought of 'pure' figures in popular culture, the main one being Barack Obama, and how he's become an untouchable 'Jesus' of the 21st century. But in the end, and this may shock some of you, I went down that old dirty back alley route of drugs. Cocaine in particular, the cruel mistress that she is.

I feel I really went for it this time in terms of research and development, because after the last module I sort of thought 'well, this is it, either I sort my shit out or join Al Qaeda.' I began looking at figures, the purity of cocaine, what it's cut with, who uses it, why, what areas of the UK is it most prominent in, etc.

One of the most shocking things I discovered was that it was largely being cut with a chemical called Phenacetin, an old pain killer from the 1800s now banned in the UK because a dosage above 500mg begins to cause cancer. And nobody wants that, just ask Jade Goody.

Anyway I thought this was a serious issue that needs to be brought to the attention of the audience of Don't Panic, I wanted to warn them without preaching. I'm not going to tell you not to do drugs, but I want you to know the risks. I don't think demonising drugs and threats of 'You'll end up stealing your mothers' pacemaker to sell for smack' work on a younger audience, what with me being one of them. You need to treat them as they are, generally relatively intellectual with a prior knowledge of drugs.

I'm rambling, take a look at some of the worky work I came up with:

Design tip: Spreading your work out makes it look like you've done more.

Those were just some of my initial ideas. Thought chalk was a good tool when doing a brief on Cocaine, but yeah, my final designs came out fairly different to what's shown here but I'm gonna have to upload those later because I left the files at college.

In the mean time, why don't you watch a film or ring an old friend to go for a drink?