REFLECTION 3: Peer Review 2

Since the last crit, I have continued to explore the links between anxiety or depression and creativity. For the practical, after finding a common interest in helping young men suffering from anxiety and depression to speak up, me and a marketing student at Leeds Beckett (who sits within the demographic) have decided to launch a t-shirt brand. Lots of our friends are very interested in fashion and wearing the right thing but mental health is a taboo. Our aim is to bring mental health into men’s fashion as a way of bringing the conversation to them. The brand will also give its profits to mind, further supporting our mission.

In the crit I got some feedback saying that men won’t want to wear their mental health on their backs. Putting my designs on t-shirts is the wrong context and they are better suited to editorial. The fact that not everyone wants a t-shirt that portrays symptoms of anxiety and depression is a definite point for consideration. Since the crit, I have asked around and had a variety of responses so I am going to vary the t-shirts from more subtle to more obvious. On the subtler t-shirts the concept will be made clear in an animated version on the website. We would also like to have something that you scan on the tshirt that plays the animated version on your phone, maybe a bar-code? But we are yet to find an app. This would work well as a light access point to starting a conversation about anxiety or depression. By showing friends their animated t-shirt, young men would do it almost without intending to. However, in terms of it being the wrong context, I personally believe that it is the right context if we want to reach our audience.

Trying to create designs that are wearable and attractive but that also communicate the concept has proved a challenge. This is because I have had to find a sort of a balance between not making light of a dark issue but also not creating something so dark that young men won’t want to wear it on a t-shirt. This is the first time I have had to balance two such different contexts. However, I have found working with someone within the targeted demographic to be very useful because I can get constant feedback from my audience. I have also found that having put so much time into the crafting each designs so that they balance the context, they have become quite separate both in subject and style. This works well to attract a wider audience, but I am worried that they won’t sit together well as a collection. However, I am hoping that I can unite them with a limited color scheme and by using a clean graphic style.

I have also recently conducted the same interviews with two sufferers and a therapist and their responses have really helped me to define anxiety in my essay as well as making me feel more secure in the direction I have taken my practical work. All of them said that the Mind definition of anxiety was accurate, but too generalized. All the symptoms were listed but most sufferers only experience a couple, making each experience of anxiety different. This supports my earlier decision to focus on specific symptoms rather than the disease as a whole, as people will hopefully find specific t-shirts more relatable.