Goodbye Freestyle: A Senior Humor or Satire Art Project by Matthew Ford (2014)

My humor type was a commencement speech. I researched several speeches, ranging from very blunt surface level material to very cutting ironic humor. I found that for the humor unit it was best to use a more blunt, upfront type of humor. I also learned that calling out specific instances that everyone knew and everyone found funny was the best way to form a connection with an audience. Every speaker also opened up with making fun of themselves in someway or another, or just acting slightly awkward and making themselves seem much more at the level of the audience. I also noticed that even if they were sort of nervous they were able to keep the audience interested and laughing by telling small anecdotes or leaving time to just ramble and try and make up a joke or story. I found that that even though the speech was humorous, they were about to wrap up everything nicely and concisely at the end of the speech. They also seemed to bring up rival schools or organizations pretty often, which seemed to raise audience interest. Mine is a simplistic comparison of Freestyle and the traditional high school experience of either Mountain View Or Los Altos.

I kept a very basic design because we were on a time crunch. I kept simplistic ideas for what the two different situations were. I mainly used the shape tools in Adobe's Illustrator. On one side I had a kid under a traditional high school graduation banner; he had a sad face and he was saying that he never really got to know that many people, which, from my experience talking to friends at traditional high school, has been the case more often than not. On the other side was a kid under the Freestyle graduation banner, he looked much happier and also said that Freestyle had altered his life positively and he had made most of his friends in Freestyle. This project was reasonably easy to create because it didn't require immensely deep thought or any color scheme.