I carried out my project from the end of second year as my personal project, working on the fashion brand Everyday Beautiful. The target audience for this brief are 19-30-year-old fashion forward individuals without judgment of age and gender, and high-end retailers. The branding for Sarora Knots was a collaborative live project with Sian, targeting creative individuals, horticulture enthusiasts, predominantly women, and people with a funky unique sense of style. My competition brief was another collaboration with Sian for the Grown Up Chocolate Company, which is targeted at young professionals of any gender who are fans of chocolate, and for customers looking to give a thoughtful, quality, playful gift.
Everyday Beautiful
I started off my personal project by researching and developing ideas for a fashion installation as they’ve become the latest ‘trend’. As I tried to develop ideas, it was difficult to picture what I had in my head in a physical space, and even harder to sketch out the journey the audience will experience. I decided to convert all the research and sketch ideas I had into a concept shop. As part of Everyday Beautiful’s audience is high-end retailers, I decided to design the shop as part of a concession for Selfridges, Birmingham, this would also help me create a journey as I had a rough idea of the space available. After looking back over my development sketches, it was clear for me to see three elements to include in the shop to make it a memorable experience for the audience: touchscreen pods where the audience can design their own outfit, how the clothes are hung, and a screen playing a presentation style video of models wearing the Double Vision collection which the audience could interact with through the Kinect sensors.
For the phone app design and concept, I carried on the same style I used for the website concept last year. I wanted the audience to interact with the clothes as much as the two other elements, so I created a barcode scanner page which the audience can use when they’re in the shop. I also included the tablet concept on the app, where the audience can create their own unique outfit using Double Vision pieces. I thought it was important that this was included on the phone app so the audience got a better understanding of the collection, and so the two apps relate to each other, not only with their elements but also the design.
As the Double Vision collection was inspired by shape, structure, detail and architecture, I designed the poster and leaflet in a 3D cube illusion style, allowing the audience to get a sense and feeling of the collection before seeing it. Also, after going through research for my dissertation, it came to light that fashion brands didn’t put photos of their collections on invites or posters as they wanted to keep it a secret and help build up the suspense.
I think that my personal project was successful, the research I carried out for my dissertation helped a lot, and the outcomes from the project related back to my dissertation. I carried out the branding and style I used for the Everyday Beautiful project in second year, so all the different elements relate to each other and follow the same guidelines. The shop concept, being the main part to this brief, was successful, the final visuals created using strata design look professional and the concepts of all three elements come across well to the viewer. The phone and tablet app are visually pleasing; the designs relate to each other and they’re both easy to navigate around. The poster design was also successful, the concept from the collection was portrayed well through it.
If I were to change anything on this project I’d create a window display for the collection, as I think this would be effective to attract people walking by to look at the collection. I’d change a couple of design faults on both apps, such as font and some graphic features being too small, and complete the design up feature on the tablet app. It would have been nice to print out my poster or leaflet, but I though as we aren’t handing in anything physical it’d add to the costs of things, and it looks professional on a mock up anyway; if it were in my FMP I’d get it printed.
Sarora Knots
My live brief was a collaboration with Sian where we did the branding for a small plant hanging business. We looked at brands such as Made and Urban Outfitters to get some inspiration for the style of the designs we would be creating. We split the work between us, and for my role I created a leaflet, business card, title pages for the lookbook, packaging and a brand guidelines booklet. To make sure all the elements looked like they were for the same brand, we had to be sure to communicate well between not only each other, but with the client.
For some aspects of the brief, such as the title pages for the lookbook, we included the client into the collaboration where we asked her to write a short paragraph which would feature at the start of each collection. I think that this worked well as she not only had better literature than me, but it added to the voice and tone of Sarora Knots by the audience having a personal connection with the owner. I had difficulty trying to get the leaflet to line up properly, so I carried out many experiments to test the fold so it worked out perfectly. I made sure to get feedback for the elements I designed from Sian, and sent the developments to the client so I could change parts where needed as I went along.
This brief was successful, the client loved everything we designed and said she would be happy to use us in the future. The key thing that made this brief work so well was communication, to have a good relationship with the client made the working process so much smoother and easier, and therefor we got what we needed doing done quicker. The outcomes look professional, even if some were finalised on mockups, you still got the experience and feel of them.
What didn’t work so well for this brief was trying to get the photos off the photographer; we thought we could rely on him to work professionally and send the outcomes on time, but it took us a couple of weeks from asking nearly every day to finally get the photos. In the future, I’m definitely going to consider collaborating with a different photographer. I would of also designed the leaflet in the two other colour schemes we used throughout the project. Although I made a mockup of the packaging, it would have been nice to see it physically to show how it would work.
The Grown Up Chocolate Company
It took me a while to find a competition brief that appealed to me, I decided to go ahead with this one as I haven’t got anything to do with food packaging in my portfolio. Again, I collaborated with Sian because we have previously worked well together and although we both weren’t keen on this brief, we bounced ideas well of each other. As most of my time was spent on my other projects and my dissertation, I didn’t get to spend as much time on it as I would have liked. We went back and created more moodboards of playful packaging targeted at adults hoping that some ideas would start developing. We both looked at branding and packaging agencies to see how they solved their briefs, and how they approached the problem in a creative way. We had to go through a lot of development and ideas at the start of this project for something to kick off and spark ideas.
After speaking to one of our tutors, helpful feedback allowed us to carry out more development and finally come up with a concept we both liked. I’d say that the style of this project wasn’t really me, but I enjoyed working on it with Sian and getting more experience out of drawing vector illustrations on illustrator. I thought I’d avoid using aftereffects for this project, but when I tried to upload my designs to Invision, they didn’t upload properly and I didn’t have enough time to figure out what the problem was, so I resulted to aftereffects to create a mockup of the landing page I created.
For the time spent on this project, I think that it’s turned out well. The final packaging turned out how we liked it and it hits the brief. We managed to follow the brand guidelines from the booklet provided with the brief, which I think is good practice for future clients. If we were to have more time on this brief I’d have liked to have created at least three different designs from the same concept, so the audience had a range to choose from. I’m disappointed that we didn’t manage to get the final packaging design printed as I think to get the full effect of the design and concept it’s always best to have a physical copy, so we had to result to using a mockup to show the final design.
