January 23, 2018
Story by Aastha Shetty
Naked: Disrobing a Modeling Scam
Link:
Objectives of this work:
Around October of 2017, a number of horror stories began cropping up on social media about children as young as 15 being lured into sending provocative nude selfies to strangers on the net who were promising a lucrative career in professional modeling. Interestingly, there are not a lot of stories about these modeling scams. I wanted to design a feature in a point-of-view format that is not only engaging but also serves as a warning to young women..
The story is designed in a non-linear format because we are in a time when most people consume their media -- whether it is news or entertainment -- in a non-traditional fashion. I put a lot of thought into the art direction, including the choice of font, which is intended to invoke nostalgia for digital coding. It's a "mechanical" font that is associated with computer language. As well, I deliberately used shadows in the interviews; the anonymous girls are still concealed in the shadows, but Carrie's lighting is a bit different. She has just come out into the light with her story.
I spent 14 straight days working on this story (including research, art direction and two days for coding/web-design). I used a variety of programs for design to overcome the limitations of the host site, which is run by WordPress.
I wanted it to resemble Facebook messenger because it is the actual setting of the story. This format is interesting to our university publication GH360's target audience, which are people who are around 16-28 years old. Most people in this age bracket spend a lot of time on social media, and are more comfortable with bite-sized, texting-like information. Twitter has caught on to this trend in information sharing, and is trying to find the magic number of characters that make posts not too long and not too short.
You can click on images to make them bigger. This story is best viewed on a larger screen, such as a laptop or a desktop computer.
GH360 is a news and information site produced by students at the University of Guelph-Humber in Toronto, Ontario, Canada.