Title Study: Steel Magnolias

One of my all-time favorites movies, the infamous "chick flick" Steel Magnolias, has a very sophisticated, yet light-hearted physique about the way the title is displayed. I like the choice of red for the font color because it's a primary color, yet it is bright enough to accent the backgrouond picture-the women and the Southern, outdoorish nature scene- by being almost apple-like. I think of an apple tree when I see the cover of Steel Magnolia's, which is slightly appropriate since the setting is in the South. That is one of the first connections that came to mind between the color red and the cover. Also, since the movie is driven towards the strength of a few badass Southern women of various ages, the color red stands out as a very strong, independent, sophisticated color, accurately depicting the lives of these women. Anything from red lipstick to red high heels could be imagined here. The font used to convey the title reminds me one known as Comic Sans. The letters are not too large, but not too small, and the bubbly, round, shape of the title letters resembles the attitudes and personalities of the women in the film. It almost seems like the font style that most women right in. In a general sense, women are typically associated with a bubbly, neat, happy-looking style of handwriting.

Progress Report

I was out last Thursday when we met with our partners and groups and discussed our proposals. I figured I would post something about the progress of Sharon and my project. We did a rough proposal to begin with, and just recently, we tried to put some sort of time frame on what we are doing. We chose tentative dates to have things completed by, with intentions of setting goals for ourselves.

Because I was sick and not able to come to class last Thursday, I was not able to hear what Professor Holmevik specified about the project proposals. From what Sharon was able to tell me, we must be a lot more specific with our dates on the proposal. We also have to do weekly progress reports, if i'm not mistaking, which I think is going to be very beneficial for the two of us to keep up with what we are doing, what we should be doing that we are not, what things need to achieve at a certain point in order to get them done, and things of that sort.

At this point, Sharon and I have got to get together again to rewrite and add more detail and specifications to our proposal. Since we are doing a PR plan for a local elementary school, we need to solidify our contact and communication with at least one official, perhaps a librarian, at the school.

Changing the Face of Poverty: Response

Since I posted remarks about the wrong article last Tuesday, I am going to post about Changing the Face of Poverty, and what I think our class could discuss, for this week’s assignment.
After reading over the article, I think it’s important that our class talk about the second part of the story, concerning the problems with representation of poverty. As a journalist, I see it vitally essential for readers, artists, poets, writers, musicians, photographers, and anyone else for that matter to represent and visualize poverty in whatever way they feel it is necessary.
Some people will go as far as to witness something first-hand, or walk in the shoes of the poor, and recount the information that they learn from their experience for the public to read and see. There is obvious controversy in this piece about whether or not representation of such things is really appropriate or necessary.
It states on the second page that “…we must see them before we can care about them” and “we must care about them before we are moved to end the intolerable conditions that mark their lives”. Does the class feel that this is true, or should we not “represent the poor” in different ways, some even artistically?
Perhaps turning something that is an on-going battle into something that is a work of art will provide an outlet for people who are not poor to understand and feel the pains of those that are poor, thus allowing them to directly relate to the suffers that the poor people are going through by using visual images of all sorts.
This especially affects the people that are our age, our generation, the age of the people in this class, because we see these things in our classes, we study these types of photographs, we sing along to the lyrics of the songs about poor people, whether we realize that or not.
We must realize that it’s not a subject to be taken lightly, and in order to fully convey the seriousness of the issue of poverty, we must use every form of communication that is available to us to educate the public.