Visual Communication - Bachelors
Parodying the esteemed pop culture journal The A.V. Club, Merryana Salem and Durr-e-‘Adan Haque present GayV Club, a podcast that invites people of all genders and sexualities to discuss and critique LGBTIQ+ representation (and misrepresentation) in film and television.
Parodying the esteemed pop culture journal The A.V. Club, Merryana and Durr-e-‘Adan present GayV Club, a podcast that invites people of all genders and sexualities to discuss and critique LGBTIQ+ representation (and misrepresentation) in film and television. The series is created by Merryana Salem, a Lebanese-Aboriginal bisexual woman, and Durr-e-‘Adan Haque, an Indonesian-Pakistani non-binary lesbian.
The podcast often allots one episode to analyse one text in the zeitgeist, however, as an ongoing development and annual tradition, our two hosts provide a year-in-review of sorts to recapitulate all of the film and television of the respective year. GayV Club is available to stream on all of your favourite podcasting platforms and support on Patreon for exclusive content in three reward tiers.
Our target audience is mostly people of colour, but generally queer people who want to hear a different perspective in the realm of media criticism. There is so much LGBTQ+ cinema and television and historically, not a lot of it has been good. One of the things that we wanted to achieve is give people advice on what was good and deconstruct what was bad.
Durr-e-‘adan haque, cocreator of GayV Club
The GayV Club brand resonates with me personally as the podcast’s original brand identity was one of my first commissions in my heyday as a budding and prospective graphic designer. Although I have grown to dislike my older pieces of work, especially one that is heavily marketed in the public sphere, the current logo remains as the hosts’ favourite iteration of their podcast’s visual identity.
This project aims to conceptualise and produce a brand identity package that enhances an existing brand’s image and reaffirms its place in the current podcasting boom.
The finished outcome adopts a vaporwave aesthetic, which has been used by artists popular among queer people like Azealia Banks and Rina Sawayama. Vaporwave is a niche, Internet-born visual art style that is heavily influenced by 90s pop culture. Vaporwave art and its visual aesthetic is commonly known to combine vibrant hues, digital imagery, and elements of glitch art to create a surrealist utopia and evoke feelings of nostalgia. The foreground of the image is an assemblage of imagery that is closely associated with both the visual aesthetics of the vaporwave genre and the GayV Club brand itself. The background adopts the colours and composition of the transgender pride flag with an added grain effect to mimic TV static.
The brand identity deliverables for this project include the following: cover artwork for streaming platforms like Spotify and Apple Music; a header and profile picture appropriate for social media channels like Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube; and merchandise such as pins or badges.
Connor Emerson is a Meanjin/Brisbane-based graphic designer and devout information professional, specialising in visual communication design for library services and their patrons. Connor is determined to conceptualise and pioneer new ideas to foster a lifelong love of reading and learning through their unwavering passion for libraries and literature.