VARA - Smoothie bar concept - Full branding experience
Better on Behance: https://www.behance.net/gallery/68835171/VARA-Smoothie-bar-concept
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VARA - Smoothie bar concept - Full branding experience
Better on Behance: https://www.behance.net/gallery/68835171/VARA-Smoothie-bar-concept
Salus Chile - the mountain plantations
From the tea plantation on the southern slopes of the Salus farm (near the town of Villarrica), you get a wonderful view of the snow-covered peak of the Villarrica volcano and the fields and forests down on the plain. Even though growing genuine black tea (Camellia Sinensis) is not common in these latitudes, Salus took the risk. “We’ve got the southernmost tea plantation in the world,”
Salus is a tea company that moved to Chile in the early 90′s. Their farms now spread on over 600 hectares of land around the Villarrica volcano. They export tea all around the world, especially in Europe and Nothern America.
I am using this farm as the base of tea origin for my brand, following the brand’s volcanic inspiration
Pitch a Papergang - one day brief
My approach for the Papergang brief is an illustrated landscape that creates a relaxing mood.
Option 1
Option 2
Final
Tin scavenging, embossing and further decisions
I went online and in stores to look for tin cans I could use. The best I could find were in T2, at a fair price. They have some nice colours and textures, but they have their logo embossed on the top (and it’s pretty big).
Since my design involved embossing, I went to the print room to ask Naomi if she could help. Because the tins are made out of metal, she instructed me to go to the metalworks section for help. I also looked online for tutorials, but they didn’t come in handy.
Another issue is the black cover that I want on the tins. My only options are covering the tins with an end-to-end sticker with the prints on, or spray-painting. Both of these involve a lot of problems with measurements, quality and the die-cut.
Due to these issues, I don’t have the necessary resources to create my design physically, so I can only do it digitally, which is a big disappointment :(.
Naming & ideation
I wrote down around 30 names for my brand, each with its own personality. The three categories that they all fit in were organic(tea-related), luxury and metals. The one I decided to go with is Obsidian, for its potential. Obsidian is a type of volcanic glass, a very dark ore-like material that was used to make weapons in the past. Because it is a very rare material, it makes a great connection to luxury, so my idea is to have the all-black traits on the package itself.
Therefore my design will be all-black, very minimal with subtle elements. The logo is very abstract, a geologic obsidian-like shape that is cut out of the black wrap, revealing the colour of the tin can, which is in relation to the tea flavour.
Primary research - Retail stores packaging
A few weeks ago I went on a trip in a few “high-end” retail stores to see what luxury gift aesthetics they use. Most of the products I have seen use a great amount modern design elements, especially marble, but a lot of them look cheap at closer-look. There still are a few older-like designs, but with modern-influences.
Research on tea
Origins
It is known that tea has originated in china in the earliest AC centuries as a medicinal drink. It quickly became popular in East Asia.
Spread
Tea was brought to Europe as “chai” by the portuguese in the 16th century. Its popularity rapidly spread, becoming Britain’s favourite drink in the 17th century. The british introduced tea to India in order to break China’s tea monopoly, thus becoming the biggest tea traders in the 18th and 19th century. India became, for a while, the biggest tea producer in the world.
Types
Main:
Black,
White,
Green,
Oolong,
Pu-erh
Flavoured:
Earl Grey,
Masala,
Jasmine,
Others(Ginger, Blueberry, etc.)
Infusions:
Leaves,
Fruit,
Flower
Production
To this day, China and India are strongly leading the tea production industry. Even so, tea production is strong in the rest of Asia, in South America and South Africa. My thoughts are to look at tea from non-leading producers, such as Argentina or Brazil.
Luxury aesthetics
A luxurious brand must have a luxurious look, but also a greater quality. People will always associate a rich brand to high prices and high quality, and a really rich, clever design can often turn them to think of luxury.
The aesthetics of luxury have evolved lot over time. What was considered that in the 13th century may be completely different with what was considered luxury in the 18th century.
In history
Design
Though often verging on the meaningless in modern marketing, "luxury" remains a legitimate and current technical term in art history for objects that are especially highly decorated to very high standards and use expensive materials.
Back in the medieval age, rich people created luxury. Kings had swords, armours, sculptures, paintings, books, etc. designed and decorated in riches and gems by the greatest artists in the world. They decorated their castles with these, for their prestigious friends and visitors to see.
Colour
In the Imperial Rome, the colour purple was the biggest symbol of power. Only worn by the imperator(emperor), the robe of Tyrian purple was made from the secretion of a particular snail. It is said that it took 10,000 snails to produce just 28 millilitres of dye. In later Rome and the Byzantine Empire, the empresses were brought to a purple room to give birth, so every child of the Emperor was known as “born in the purple”, a title that gave them great respect all of their lives.
Today
In our times, luxury is seen in a slightly different way. People start to view it from different perspectives, but a few elements still stand tall: high quality and rich structure(materials). A lot of designs elements have been taken off, to make “room” for more white space, in the biggest movement going on in our millennium - minimalism. Even googling “luxury” would give you only minimalist results. Minimalism is now the leading design choice in every field - interior, exterior, branding/packaging, fashion, art and even UI. The aesthetic elements of minimalism are simple: lots of white space, geometric shapes, pale colours with touches of contrast.
Colours & elements
In today’s luxury and elegance, the colours are mostly pale, and the popular palettes change quite often.
The colour psychology finds purple and black to be the most elegant and luxurious of the wheel. White and gold are also solid classic choices. Thinking about it, all of these are followers of the older luxury choices. Gold is the oldest luxury known to human, while white comes from marble and purple from the roman empire. Black may be the newest and fastest-growing colour of choice, for its simplicity and dominant look.
In the most recent years, designers have created trends that became incredibly popular. According to the John Lewis yearly retail report, people have been looking for pink items 200% more than they did in 2016, with gold coming to a close second place. Industrial elements have been showing up more and more in the design world, with marble and copper rising unexpectedly fast among customers’ preferences.
Target audience
The target customers for a tea brand is incredibly broad, but the audiences buying from high-end retail stores are a bit more definite.
After looking through the retail analysis of retailers such as Ted Baker, John Lewis and Selfridges, I found out that most customers that buy regularly are 35 to 60 years old. As the Selfridges report says, “Customers who can buy luxury brands are usually people who have a solid economic base”.
As the brief says, the tea is something that a person would buy as a luxurious gift. Even though maybe someone wouldn’t even drink the tea, the point is to have a rich-looking design on your shelf, a design that everyone can consider it to be luxurious.
Luxury packaging research
Today, luxury can be viewed in very different ways. Though more people look at minimalism as now’s luxury, it has always been a combination of great detail, materials and colours.
What people consider as luxury can vary from field to field, but someone will always be able to tell which one is which. Even though, there are a lot of thins imitating luxury, and a lot of people cannot tell the difference. Thus, we need to create something that truly expresses richness, that isn’t similar to everything else on the market.
In packaging, there are two ways in which a tea brand can be seen as luxurious: classic and minimalist. It depends on the customer to see which one is preferred more. One thing that is certain is the message sent. This can be done through small things among the design, such as metal foils, font choice, embossing/debossing, shape, patterns but most importantly, colour.
Competitor research - Luxurious tea brands
I pretty much decided to go with tea as my choice, because I feel that a tea tin has much more potential compared to a coffee tin. Though I am not very familiar with any tea brands at all, I started looking online into what people consider “the best luxurious tea brands”.
Harrod’s
A company known especially for their luxurious items, Harrod’s has one of the fanciest tea boxes. Founded over 150 years ago, the brand has a lot of history and recognition behind its back. Their tea has some seriously good packaging, on gold or other elegant colours, using emboss and metal foil as well.
Harney and sons
Harney and sons is an american brand, founded in 1983. They are a tea-only company, but the packaging on their products is always elegant, luxurious, with great colour combinations.
East India Company
Once the world’s richest trading company, East India still is still in operation, in a completely different, modern way. They are now known for the luxury in their brand’s appeal, with tea being one of their products.
We are building the brand on the basis of compassion, not aggression. Drawing upon our wealth of heritage and connections we stand for unity in diversity.
Investigating Contemporary Practice
Brief Overview
“To design and develop a new, exciting and eye-catching range of at least three tins for either teas or coffees.”
The new brief asks us to create a fictional luxurious brand of teas or coffees with tin-can packaging, meant to be displayed in high-end retail stores (M&S, Selfridges) and duty-free airport shops. The cans are meant to be bought as luxurious gifts packs.
In designing these packages, we need to look at and use the material of the tins (metal) and use its features (emboss/deboss, shine). We also need to create three different designs.
Points to consider:
Creative use of tin
Marriageability as a set of three luxury tins Innovative use of decorative and graphic elements Re-usability as a secondary pack
Shelf impact
Consumer appeal as luxury gift packaging
Binding
As I mentioned before, the binding we chose to use is perfect binding. This is to show that our magazine aims for the most professional look, like it’s a real publication.
Binding 8 copies in only 7 hours was a big issue, but we managed to get it done in time.
Magazine layout & design
Layout planning
Over the winter I created a plain indesign document in which I started planning and playing around with the image/text layouts. I wanted as many different styles as possible.
Design
As soon as I got the content from my group mates, I started planning the pages in order and high detail.
The only step left was to design the, magazine. I used Adobe Indesign for this.
Designing the cover
I wanted to go with just the name (Contrast) on the top and with a big element that’s soon going to be cut ( <edition> 01). I designed the front cover and used a mock texture from the internet at first, to see how it would look like.
For the back of the cover, I used the logo of the publication, but I wasn’t sure what else to put on. After asking for opinions, I sticked to one of the designs and started to layout the whole A3 page.
Though at first I added a strip (that included a barcode and the logo), we decided to take that out due to printing and binding issues. In the end, we left out a strip on the front cover to show more of the texture.
Cover design - Inspiration & Research
For the design of the cover, I wanted to look at the best options we could use - Should I use the classical elements (barcode, edition, masthead)? Should I use die-cutting? Should we go for contrast on the page or leave a normal photo?
I looked for some inspiration, then I sketched out the best ideas that came to head