Starting The Cults Brief

After doing some research into the cults I wanted to look at for this brief I decided upon The Peoples Temple, The Manson Family, Scientology and The Raelian Church. Using the content and information I discovered in that researching phase, here is how I progressed with the people's temple so far.

Peoples Temple -'reaching a maximum of 3000 members'-http://www.caic.org.au/biblebase/apocolyptic/jones.htm -death toll 914-http://www.angelfire.com/ms/perring/russo.html -Spiritual leader- Jim 'Dad' Jones. -Spiritual home. Jonestown Guyana -Core beliefs= Mixture of Communism, Socialism and Pentecostal Christianity -founded in 1955 -ended 1978 (at the time of the Jonestown Massacre) -The use of cyanide-laced Grape flavoured Kool Aid to kill its members has led to the phrase 'Drink the kool aid' which means to blindly accept or believe in something without questioning it.


Looking at the drink the kool aid aspect, which is the most significant, here are some marks that might be interpreted as water/liquid.

And what follows is quick digitised versions of 'Drink the kool aid'. I'd seen the font 'bebas' or something similar used in quite a few things recently so I wanted to play around with that. Anyway heres the result, I used the purple colour to simulate the grape colour of the kool aid that the temple members drank. I also started messing around with a wave shape to simulate liquid. I thought that this was quite effective, but there was something missing from the design that would make it great, it felt a little flat.



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I started to focus on the content on the inside of the booklet, I was inspired by some work Joe Gilmore showed us from his studio Qubik:



The fold isn't centre, but a bit to the left, creating this unique look where some information from the inside is permanently on display down the right edge of the page. This is a unique way to display small and simple bits of information. I thought I could use this to display the small facts about the cults, like their leader, spiritual home, peak membership and death toll. Heres the progress of that:

Open publication - Free publishing - More temple

I got some content from this website: http://www.religioustolerance.org/dc_jones.htm which summarised the whole moevement quite quickly. I did some editing and put in the bit about the cyanide laced grape soda because I thought it would make a nice pull quote to summarise the whole piece. Creating a unity between the wave imagery and the subject matter: I started to mimic the shape of liquid to create a quotation space and this quite quickly created an interesting visual effect, after a few bad ideas, the booklet quickly took shape to a point I'm happy with.