The Stress Reducer
The Stress Reducer explores the typeface LL Unisoft77 through the material that calms all your nerves: Play-Doh. The project explores in the performance the sarcastic approach to relief stress in todays society. The result is a deliberately sarcastic take on stress relief.
Hereby we question how contemporary culture treats stress and criticize the trend of perfection.
Concept
Early on, we knew we wanted to work with Play-Doh. It is a material without a fixed form: it can beshaped endlessly. This made the choice of working with LL Unisoft 77 very clear.
Its soft curves and playful character make the two become one.
For the performance we wanted to work with contrasts. We realised that the act of forming the clay was itself very stressrelieving. That led us to ask how Play-Doh could be placed into a contemporary context connected to adulthood.
Our answer is a combination of a medical procedure, paired with the colourful and soft material. With this setting, we critique today’s looksmaxxing, tiktok, mainstream culture of trying to achieve perfection in dehumanizing humans.
We decided on creating a performance which shows this very cold procedure but at the same time having these playful tools to reduce stress.
Performance
Inspiration
Visual Moodboard
Moodboard Visual
Performance Moodboard
Moodboard Performance
Development
Visual
Inspired by our performance and knowledge that we will be working with dough, we were thinking about how we can finalise it.
At first we started with movement analyses in after effects after regarding that we will work with play and testing the limits of the typefaces variability.
Also what we found was that the typeface has a lot of glyphs which we also incooperated in the animation part.
Analysis
Movement Study
Movement
As we knew that we wanted to a have a stretch, squeeze and roll element we sketched variations of how that could look like in motion as well
Layout
As our layout was inspired by medic descriptions we wanted to do the layout accordingly. We experimented with different layouts as we decided to a very simple and bold layout whereas we have a clear font in the center in different sizes and weights. And detail typo small as description. Simplicity is a core element as you can tell by the process where we reduce more and more.