Chris Campbell

This project challenges the perceptions of online pirates and seeks to understand the harm they can cause to both large and small intellectual property creators. I approached the brief using a pragmatic response allowing the viewer to make their own decision but to be guided by my outcome. The project also aims to raise general awareness about online piracy.

My approach was to create an awareness campaign. More specifically I ended up using a type and image-based poster and web campaign. Utilising the design principle of repetition, I wanted to visualise the scale of online piracy to create awareness that the viewer may well be contributing to the problem, as well as offering them an opportunity to stand against piracy and make a change.

The strategy behind my campaign is to use commonly made excuses by online pirates such as “It’s just one download” and “they make enough money already” that the viewer may use themselves to rationalise their actions. I accompanied this messaging with a hundred repeating icons associated to the quote, then added one extra icon in green symbolising the potential in the viewer, that they can be the outlier who isn’t exacerbating the problem in piracy. The messaging ties into the campaigns brand “100+1 excuses” (One hundred and one excuses) titled as such, as there are already hundreds using an excuse and the extra one represents the viewer adding to it. However, they can separate themselves from the problem and be a change, hence the 1 hasn’t been added to the 100 yet to form 101.

I decided upon the colour choice of green and red for this project as it represents the good and the bad, with red being the majority used colour representing pirates and green being a minority colour representing the potential in the viewer.