But, what do they want? And do they want what I want?

 




   While doing this past week's Metaphor Assignment, I found myself filled with stress that Mad Men's Peggy Olsen and Don Draper would describe as inspiring. So much of the assignment was me trying to figure out what my audience would want to see and how my audience would react to what I was showing them. And this was all done while not knowing who my audience really was. The difficulty came even further when I couldn't even figure out what my work really meant. When designing any sort of advertisement it seems imperative that there be some kind of connection to the work as a designer. Putting as much love and care for the work makes it feel personal and the audience will sense that, and ultimately gravitate towards your work. As I attempted to do the poster for this project, there was an immediate gravitation for me to do what made sense to my audience verses what made sense to me as the designer. My attempts to appeal to an overall audience was lost when I couldn't connect to my work. Although there was a plethora of options to choose from when it came to choosing metaphors that I heard during the week, I struggled between two. Both were pretty pessimistic to an extent but poetic. The first being "put a price on emotion, I'm looking for something to buy" a line from Harry Styles' song Fine Line. Whilst the other was a line from the movie " Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs " in which the father figure says " not all sardines, are meant to swim". Despite both being pretty negative, one perpetuates the feeling of giving up that no one likes to feel. While the other describes the feeling of being so emotionally numb that a person wants to feel anything. People can relate to feeling the latter but would rather never feel like the former. My struggle with this project raises the question of what things are off the table when trying to get an emotional response from your audience.



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