Purpose
I was assigned the topic of drug and alcohol abuse for this project. I already have a very strong interest in this topic, and I decided to take a standpoint which addressed the potential causes of addiction. Based on my research both prior to and during this project, I learned that the most likely cause of addiction is the inability for people to connect with other people and with society. My overarching goal was to get people to challenge their pre-existing ideas about what causes addiction, and to consider the idea that it may be caused by isolation.
Parameters
This spread is the first of a three-part series of work that I did on the topic of addiction. The project objective was to create a two-page spread for a monthly news magazine that would communicate a strong standpoint on an assigned topic. The spread had to adhere to the specs of the news magazine. The amount of body copy was limited to only 100 words, so the focus was primarily on conveying a concept through imagery.
Process
Once I decided on my concept, I experimented with thumbnail sketches and simplified digital illustrations and tried to convey the idea of isolation causing addiction. This concept originally came from a psychology experiment that took place in the 1980s that demonstrated that isolated rats were far more likely to become addicted to drugs than rats living in a community. After experimenting with simplified metaphors and symbols to attempt to communicate this concept, I ultimately decided to actually illustrate the experiment to convey the concept.
