A Bit About Keywords
- Catherine Dwelley
- Feb 5
- 3 min read
I started work developing the keywords last semester during the research process. I was reading a lot of papers and articles about food insecurity and learning about the barriers to access. I recognized that there was a need for privacy for those dealing with internalized stigma, but also a need to make existing resources more visible and community oriented in order to fight that stigma. We need to reframe food support as community empowerment rather that charity. And that started to sound like activism, or a movement. So I thought of more words in that vein, read through my notes to get more ideas, and looked for synonyms that gave me visual inspiration.
I also thought about what I wanted the result to be, and how I wanted people to feel. People struggling with food insecurity often feel isolated, so I thought of community and networking. If they are struggling with internalized or structural stigmas, and I want them to feel empowered, or dignified.
I landed on three words that inspired me creatively, but felt visually different to give some different directions. The audience is generally college students in their late teens to early 20s, although students of all ages are affected. I want the content to feel vibrant and hopeful, and not slink into the background.
The keywords I chose are Optimism, Abundant, and Empower.
Optimism is hope for now and what’s next. Optimism encourages personal engagement through a rainbow of color and motion. Illustration integrates with photography for a mix of reality and imaginative possibility.
Abundant is the idea of plenty. It helps remove the notion of scarcity and charity, and replaces it with a system of sharing. Layers of bright color, interesting textures, and tactile forms invite interactivity and participation.
Empower is confident and bold, and encourages community participation—not just hungry students, but allies as well—through clear hierarchy, strong contrasts, and visual cues that invite action and ownership.
Visualizing with Keywords
The next step was to start visualizing. I created a board on Pinterest to gather some pulls for each keyword, but found that organization between boards was pretty awkward for my workflow. I'm a tactile person, so I save every pull that remotely interested me and printed them out. I spread them out on my work table and began to organize into piles. While taking more time, this process helps me organize my thoughts and get to know the imagery in a way that is more thorough than moving pixels around on a screen.
Building moodboards was the next step. I refined my imagery further, even making swaps when I found a pull that worked better under a different keyword. Here's what I landed on for each:
Optimism
Abundant
Empower
Reflection
This process felt different than previous projects where I would just start brainstorming based on what I already thought I knew about the topic. This was really more research based, and words came out slowly over the course of several weeks of writing and discussing it during class. I feel like through this particular research process, I was more immersed in my topic, and really got to know it inside and out. At the end of the semester I had landed primarily on Empower as my main keyword, but I’m not sure I got the visual feel quite right yet.
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