How to... Research

How to understand the UK regional accents of people in our year on our Graphic Design course.

We started out on this task by researching the most common accents in the UK.

• Queen's English
• Geordie
• Scottish Highlands
• Yorkshire
• Welsh
• Northern Irish
• Cockney
• West Country
• Scouse
• Glaswegian
• Birmingham
• Lancastrian
• Mancunian
• Black Country
• Estuary English
• Norfolk
• Potteries

Most common accents

We then chose four which we felt best linked to the accents of people on our Graphic Design course:

• Scouse 
• Geordie
• Essex
• Yorkshire

Our idea is to produce a set of flashcards with phrases and words from each region. We plan to have a stereotypical illustration of a female/male from each region on the front of each card in order for the audience to recognise and identify which card they need to look at.

Stereotypical representations of a female/male from each region:

• Scouse

Scouse female 1

Scouse female 2

Characteristics

• Rollers
• Big Eyebrows
• Fake Tan

• Geordie

Geordie female 1

Geordie female 2

Characteristics:

• Fake tan
• False eyelashes
• Big hair

• Yorkshire

Yorkshire boys

Characteristics: 

• Flat cap
• Stubble
• Farmer like

• Essex

Essex boy 1

Essex boy 2

Characteristics 

• False Tan
• Groomed eyebrows
• Quiffed hair

We went on to finding popular slang phrases or words from our chosen regions which we think that people on our course would find hard to understand.

Our main inspiration for the characters came from a past LCA Graphic Design student, Dean Gray. We liked his simplistic designs and decided to have our own take on his illustrations of the LCA tutors. We first planned our ideas on an A3 design sheet where we mocked up each one of our illustrations and certain characteristics we wanted each one to have. For example we associate rollers with people from Liverpool.The process of making our characters was fairly starightforward. I used Adobe Photoshop to create each using the shape tool to create each aspect of the face. We chose to keep our designs very simple as we didnt want to overcrowd the final flashcard with information and images.