For the final brief of the second year, we were to imagine that the organisation 'Reporters Without Borders' had came to us as a designer to see what 'we can do for them'. This brief served as a vehicle for us to explore our interest in a certain area in Graphic Design, mine at the time was heavily editorial design.
 
"Reporters Without Borders is one of the world’s leading independent organisations dedicated to promoting and defending freedom of information. Thanks to its network of active correspondents in over 150 countries, Reporters Without Borders strives daily to maintain a free press in every corner of the globe." 
 
Having an interest in editorial and publication design I decided to produce a book/publication for RWB, specifically looking at 'Enemies of the Internet' - a downloadable PDF released by RWB in March 2013. This document identifies the five state enemies of the Internet, "five “spy” states that conduct systematic online surveillance that results in serious human rights violations.

Each of these 5 states has their own chapter, these chapters shows the amount of access each population has to the internet. This is illustrated via the amount of legible text within each page. As the reader progresses through the book, that percentage decreases, along with the legibility of the text.

The PDF I based my book's content on shows the 5 states (China, Syria Bahrain, Vietnam and Iran) and explains how each of the states' goverments monitor their population's internet, as well as showing the speed of the internet available and how much of the population in each state have access to the internet. 

 

I specifically focused on showing how much of each states' population had access to the internet, this is illustrated via blacking out of text with strikethrough lines. These lines are printed on 140 gsm tracing paper and hide percentages of the text equal to the amount of the states' population that don't have access to the internet, the statistics are as follows: 

 

Bahrain: 23%

China: 57.9%

Vietnam: 66% 

Iran: 67.2%

Syria: 77.5%

As the reader progresses through the book, it becomes harder and harder to understand the text, specifically the idea of  'seeing but not being able to access information' within this one-off book. 

 

Parts of the text are made illegible/ borderline illegible via 'pop-up' style computer messages, e.g when your computer can't display an image or when you get an error message pop up on screen. These 'errors' were designed to illustrate the document slowly being 'corrupted' as the percentages increased. As if the state's goverment has caught the reader and is trying to make the book illegible to 'protect valuable information'.