DR ME - flag

After looking at the lyrics, we decided to focus in on certain aspects of the song. We also looked at what 

"Put the flowers you find in a vase." - a plea to value and savour the beauty of being alive, to seize and enjoy the moment.

"If you're dead in the mind it will brighten the place." - to be able to truly reach that understanding one has to let go of worldly concerns.

"I'm trying but I'm graceless. Don't have the sunny side to face this." - self mocking, deficiencies when dealing with conflicting.

Graceless seems to be all about dealing with human relationships in your life that you value, and there are times when certain aspects are beyond our control. You would always hope that you had the grace to deal with these situations with grace and care. Matt Berninger, the lead singer of The National, stated "A Person with grace is somebody who's socially graceful or is a classy person, but sometimes you just feel the opposite of that, and you just feel like a jerk and a loser and a weirdo." We wanted to pick up on this idea of contrast, being bold and conscious. Not being afraid to be graceless.

Following on from our previous idea, we decided to stick with the layering of materials. We felt this was very fitting in terms of our chosen lyric, and it would allow us to experiment with format, layout and materials that aren't necessarily associated with flags. 

Initially, we wanted there to be two layers, both fabric. However, as we are included text, we realised that we would be unable to laser cut words out of fabric. This is because the counters would simply fall out. We then considered using a stiffer fabric, or even card. I felt that using card would look quite cheap and not as effective as using fabric. It was finally decided that we would experiment with acetate and fabric. 

We went down to James in print and asked him whether or not he had acetate big enough to fit our design on, which would be 1m x 1.5m. The acetate downstairs was just short of a metre. He therefore had to order in a bigger roll for us, which he was willing to do. The acetate layer would feature the chosen lyrics, whilst the fabric behind would feature a pattern design relating to the song.