How to deal with sensitive topics in design? How to design sensitive topics? How to handle typography, color, layout.

How physical and digital publication complement each other and what's the value in either form and what am I am providing for my audience with the urge topic.


How do you conduct design into these difficult areas?

My initial design question was modelled around the idea on how to expose and disrupt traditional patriarchal ideologies and structures of inequality by introducing feminist art visualised in publishing and in media. My main goal was to learn how to conduct design into these difficult areas and how to design sensitive subjects that revolve around the topics of domestic violence, gender inequality, sex-selective abortion and limiting women's roles in everyday life. It was a challenge for someone like me who did not have any experience in dealing with a content sensitive project like this.
In the beginning my research was very versatile and it was difficult to set up the main design and learning goal until I've decided to focus firstly on textual part and typographic experiments, followed by a layout design, the meaning of colours and binding techniques, and what these elements stand for in a print publication, such as in a magazine. Those elements were my guidelines for the finalisation of my urgent publishing.

Even though I shifted with my designs and experimented a lot in the process, it was a necessary step for myself to gain knowledge on how to properly and respectfully approach my urgent topic: discrimination of womxn in Western Balkan countries. My final project, therefore, came out as a dual printed publication in a form of a magazine, noticeably divided by color codes (red-warning: patriarchy, purple-justice: feminism) and specific typographic layouts communicating different parts of articles. Next to that, my digital publication strives to be an online collective and research platform for womxn and perspectives that have been—and still often remain—underrepresented, oppressed, and ignored. Designed in a purple color code, as opposed to printed publication, online platform entirely focuses on the empowerment of women. The main goal of the online platform is to collect a wide range of critical insights, perspectives and practices of activists, researchers, academic, writers, artists, curators, and to represent and credit the value of their work in the biannual printed feminist publication #FREEWIFEY.

With that being said, my hybrid #FREEWIFEY publication answers my first ever learning question on how physical and digital publication complement each other and what's the value in either form.

"How to disrupt traditional patriarchal ideologies and structures of inequality by conveying critical insights, practices and perspectives of feminist artists in western balkan countries?

DESIGN QUESTION

LEARNING QUESTION