Google X HMCT

Google X HMCT D&AD Brief 2020, "Use music and typography to highlight a cause" We chose a group called “The Idles” who are based in the UK, they’re openly political and often speak out against toxic masculinity, immigration, mental health and working class justice. When reading the lyrics for their song Heel / Heal, we interpreted some of the lyrics having a link to the hidden homeless. Therefore we wanted this album to work as a campaign to raise awareness of the hidden homeless, those who often aren’t perceived as homeless but spend their time sofa surfing and sleeping on peoples floors, or those who have been failed by the emergency housing. We choose to look at punk as a visual style and reference for this brief because punk has always played a big role in social movements. Instead of looking at the historical ideologies of punk is still relevant today we chose to look at a modern punk band. For the typography we opted for a Gothic black letter option from the Google font collection. We decided to use a gothic black letter type because of it’s contextual link. The term Gothic was first used to describe this typeface style in 15th-century Italy, in the midst of the Renaissance, because Renaissance humanists believed this style was barbaric and Gothic was a synonym for barbaric. Which we felt contextually linked back to the idea of punk and how people percieve it. We paired it with a hand drawn style type for body text, we wanted it mimic and visually resemble hand written script because we wanted it feel like scribbles or messages from somebody who was homeless. We manipulated the font slightly by make it scruffier, we scratched away part of the typeface and added a grain effect to it to give the type a rough texture. This is to visually represent the idea of sleeping rough.