Overview

The First Things First manifestos were written to alert designers on the rise of detrimental society and environment that we live in. It brought up many points about how the society had suffer due to design.

Through learning about the history of the manifesto, I asked myself, “what is design?”. I landed on a single word, Change. Design is essentially change, tweaking things, be it adding or subtracting, shrinking or expanding, design is change. It changes the medium, the message, the voice, the people, the mindset and many others, for better or worse, design is change.

For a duotone publication, I chose to play with the concept of Duality, good vs bad, happy vs sad, hope vs loss. The manifestos were then split into two parts, one portraying the detrimental eects of design and the other hoping for a cured world. Bacteria, viruses was then chosen to be used to embody Design. This is because they are continuously evolving, growing, changing, just like design.

For the start of the book, I used the title Pandemic to talk about the negative effects of design due to marketing and materialization. Design at that point was affecting the entire world. Everywhere we go, there is design and it affects us in the subtlest ways, just like a creeping infection or virus, unnoticed, yet detrimental.

As the publication continues the count of bacterias gets worse and worse until it reaches a point of saturation. This the publication turns into another book, Antidote. As the publication continues, the bacteria count reduces showing that there is still hope. This is to tell designers that we have to do the right thing to stop what has been done to the society before.