Series of promotional materials, 
2018

Promotional (Mis)information is a collection of cheaply produced promotional materials that responds to the way graphic design is valued when design templates come into play. The project intends to reflect the graphic design marketplace where the discipline is reduced to its commodity form. It consists of three parts with each inspired by a different type of graphic design template—from banal stock images to the online marketplace, Fiverr. They aim to reveal the imitative, uninteresting and pre-determined nature of these templates through an exploration of text and image.

_{Text written by Adelia Lim unless otherwise stated.}

Each postcard is the result of an amalgamation of images that come up when a specific keyword is searched on a stock image platform. Unoriginal and cliché representations overlap one another in each collage, bringing to attention the repetitive nature of stock images and at the same time revealing certain stereotypes found in them.

This part of the project takes promotional copywriting found on graphic design template platforms and inputs it into Google Translate. The text goes through multiple rounds of translation in other languages and then back to English again. The result is a chunk of text with broken sentence structures and oddly-used adjectives. The reader is either unable to make sense out of the text, or simply misinformed due to its incoherency. The process is synonymous with graphic design templates. The machine’s attempt to operate in human language is the same way a non-designer tries to dabble with graphic design. 

The banner takes inspiration from gig descriptions found on Fiverr*. These one-liner descriptions that seem to follow a template as to how they are written are collated, categorised and typeset into a long monotonous list. Through the use of repeating dollar signs and a reference to vernacular typography, the work intends to create a disorienting experience whre the viewer is bombarded with a multitide of information all at once.