I am beginning to Generate ideas for creating a website. On this website I am wanting to create a gateway for people from indigenous cultures to be able to express themselves whether it be in Art, Music, Film, Poetry etc. I feel that this a great way for New Zealand and hopefully the rest of the world, to understand how the minorities feel about certain issues and also witness the creativity and talents they possess.
The reason why I want the site to focus on people from indigenous cultural backgrounds is because I feel that our cultures are what makes us unique. When we reflect back to our cultural heritage is when we begin to discover new ideas that can be brought into westernised practice that more people can appreciate, learn and expand from.
One example of a minority group that took westernised practice into their hands and began creating something new to pop culture was the African-Americans. They created the Hip-Hop movement, creating Music, Dance and Art that expressed themselves. I love Hip-Hop as I can appreciate the creativity in it and I wanted to somehow express this in the presentation of the website.
My focus for the websites Logo is to be based on classic Graffiti of the 80’s, as I see the potential in this style of Art. The thing that attracted me the most about Graffiti was the idea to create a new identity/name for yourself, and painting it up everywhere for everyone to see and hoping people would admire what you created. So me and another fellow classmate Lincoln TeWhaiti came up with the name “MOTN” (pronounced Moh-Tin) which stands for “Mind Of The Natives.”
So we began looking into classic “Throwie” styles of graffiti from Artists ‘Cope’ and ‘Seen’ and other references.
I also looked at some websites, this one was of the German Graffiti Artist ‘Cantwo’, I wasn’t really digging the set up of the site but the functionality was simple enough and it had the kind of content I wanted to be within our site. It was very ‘visual’ which is the most important part for me, as I want visitors to have full attention to what’s being presented. It had an urban feel to the site so I found it to be very relevant in regards to our website.
![found at: http://www.cantwo.de](https://cassheardown.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/screen-shot-2015-07-22-at-10-15-35-am.png?w=300&h=219)
I found another website “Nga Aho” Which was focussing on Maori designers who try to help Maori communities with various designing issues. I found that this websites goals were very similar to mine, in regards of building communities. So I thought it was a perfect website to reference for what we want to accomplish. The set up wasn’t that interesting to me but I still appreciated what it was all about.
![found at: http://www.ngaaho.maori.nz/index.php?m=2](https://cassheardown.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/screen-shot-2015-07-22-at-11-09-33-am.png?w=300&h=205)
found at: http://www.ngaaho.maori.nz/index.php?m=2
I had a little practice trying to create our ‘urban’ logo, when ever I said ‘MOTN’ quickly I found out that it made out that it sounded like I was saying “mutton” reminding me of lamb. So I tried drawing the ‘O’ in the word as a lamb chop or some sort of meat just playing with the name. Although I wanted to try having a graffiti like Logo, I found that I wasn’t to good at drawing graffiti letters so I wasn’t to pleased with the results. But it was just a practice and I will try developing it until Lincoln and I are both satisfied.
I’ll be looking into more websites very soon and I will continue to work on our Logo, also we will have to find a certain type of template for our website.
Liking the logo design. you definitely got your own style going for you.
thanks sensei G