Empowering Gen Z Girls
Objectives
I am very passionate about a few things, but specifically for this project, I wanted to focus on using new technologies (generative AI) to create a series of items that center around empowering young women. This is a self-initiated project that is dear to me because I have two daughters of my own and I aim to empower them by motivating them and showing them that women are strong, resilient, and fierce. I used Nikita Gill’s poetry for the pieces of this project and Midjourney to create the imagery. Midjourney is fabulous, but it still requires some ‘paintover’ (fixing specific areas of the generated image using Photoshop after it’s been exported) at times. Midjourney is only a small part of this, however. I also wanted to play with the typography to make it a unique work of art.
Target Audience
The audience for this is gen z girls who are in middle school and / or high school. Girls in middle school are beginning to blossom into the young women they will become and every experience they have at this point in their life will help inform and shape who they become. I wanted to do something that would help shape their view of themselves in a positive way.
Deliverables
A set of posters (3), stickers, journal covers, and iPhone cases.
Design Strategy
I opted for bold, bright, saturated colors, added some fun texture with the use of digital washi tape and 3D bubble lettering, and also had some fun with using outlines for the words that I wanted to emphasize.
In order to make this look like one unified set, I kept the color palette to a minimum and tied it all in by using the teal/cyan color in all three designs. I also carried the washi tape and lettering to all designs. Even though the backgrounds were different looked like a set because there were several other elements that tied them all together.
Posters
Poster 1: If They Truly Love You
The theme of this poster is that if someone (not necessarily even a romantic partner) loves you, they will love you during the good times (ocean breeze) and the bad times (summer storms). Nikita uses the weather metaphorically to explain that true love isn’t only present when conditions are perfect. Because I wanted to vary the visuals and not have only the negative aspects of her poetry portrayed visually, I opted to show the beautiful, calm, ocean breeze. The AI-generated image and the final poster are side-by-side.
Poster 2: Pieces
This poem talks about a young girl giving so much of herself to everyone else and getting nothing in return from some of those people that it leaves her feeling empty and heavy hearted. For imagery, I used a heart that was dripping, emptying...dying. I chose to remove the girl from the image because I didn’t want (1) to distract from the poem and (2) for any girl viewing this to compare herself to the image of the girl.
Poster 3: Too Much
Women often have to hear how we are “too emotional” or “dramatic.” This narrative is damaging to young girls because it invalidates their emotions and makes them think of themselves as being weak for having valid feelings and displaying them. The background image of the poster shows a lot of masks with varying emotions. Putting them all together on display at the same time felt like a good way to show the rollercoaster of emotions that we all feel at some point or another.
Stickers
Using the same imagery, I took bits of the poems that I felt were most powerful and made them into stickers that gen z likes to put on laptops, water bottles, etc.
Next, I wanted to turn those words around into the first person and put a positive, empowering spin on them.
Journals
I kept the journal covers simple by using only the imagery
iPhone Cases
As with the journals/notebooks, I opted to keep just the imagery for the iPhone cases. I believe that if a young girl has the poster on their wall and the iPhone case, just seeing the imagery alone is enough to serve as a reminder of the powerful words in the poem.