For this module I completed three briefs. I decided to do one brief on general Graphic Design, which was the Revolution brief where I looked at promotional items of an existing brand. For the second brief I did the logo and branding of a new shop, which enabled me to work in the Retail Graphics area which I enjoy but also to look at the Boutique market which is something I haven’t yet looked at. My third brief was to redesign the inside of a store, which was Miss Selfridge which is a High Street brand so I would have experience working on different areas of Retail market and also two different areas of Retail Graphics.
When I originally planned the brief for Revolution I intended for it to be completed in a week. As I started working on it I started to get more and more confused about what it was that I was actually doing. I think this is down to the fact that I didn’t make the brief clear enough and actually state exactly what it was that I was doing. So while working on the brief I kept going round in circles trying different ideas and realising they weren’t working but couldn’t work out why. After having a chat with Fred I reclarified what I was doing and rewrote the brief. I was then able to complete the brief within a few days.
The first ideas I was doing for the brief where I was using collage and line drawings I really liked and I think worked well when I was doing them on a small scale, but when I put them onto an A3 poster they didn’t work as well so I decided to try a photographic approach. The photographs turned out ok but I still felt it wasn’t working. From first writing the brief I had an idea of how I wanted the posters to look and how the layout would be. I looked at other alcohol advertising campaigns such as Absolute vodka and that’s where I got the idea of showing the flavour of the vodka in the shot glass. I also look at other adverts and posters with a simple layout and found a lot of them had the same principles so I decided to follow these principles. When I changed the brief to promoting different events I wanted to keep it as simple as possible so decided to focus on colour, type and an image to show the event and thought vector imagery was the best way to show this. I think the final posters worked well and through trying out illustration, photography and vector I think vector worked best.
On the second brief, which was the Milk brief, I knew I wanted to produce a bag and swing ticket for the final products. I started to work on the logo first so that I could then apply it to the products. I did lots of ideas for the logo but then couldn’t decide which one to use. I managed to narrow it down to two final logos so worked with both of these. I vectorised them on the computer but found they didn’t work as well as a baby shop logo because they looked too harsh. I experimented with colours to use looking at all the typical baby colours but none of them worked. I couldn’t use blue or pink because it would lean too much towards one sex and the generic colours such as yellow or green still didn’t work. From this I decided to use grey as it works well on white, which is the colour of the paper stock I am using. I also thought the logo would look better hand drawn and scribbled in to add some weight to it. This was the logo I decided to go with. I didn’t want the bag and swing ticket to just be an ordinary one, I always like to do something with a twist, so I started to think about how I could make it special. Then I thought about cotton wool and the idea of wrapping your child up in cotton wool. Through this I decided to line the inside of everything with cotton wool. When I was making the mock-ups I was using cotton wool but it was too messy and got everywhere so I found something similar but it didn’t make a mess so I used this in the final products. I think I could have printed the logo onto the stock professionally if I have had the time but for the amount of time I had I just had to hand draw it on. I am happy with the final products that came out of this project.
I spent so much time on the first two briefs that by the time I started the third brief, which was to redesign the interior of Miss Selfridge, I didn’t have a lot of time left and so didn’t get to do as much researching as I would have liked. I also could have done a lot more with the interior of the shop than just redesigning the signage and putting something on the walls. I am happy with how I showed the context of the work by putting it into a collage as it would have been too difficult to Photoshop it all in and could have looked too cramped. I wanted to look at how other companies visualise environments so I could have got some influence from this.
Overall I think this module went well and enabled me to focus on the areas of Graphic Design that I enjoy. I think I would want to possibly expand on some of the briefs, as I didn’t have enough time to work on them. I had trouble sticking to the initial deadlines I set myself but I knew I would do that so that why I put them in place early than they needed to be.
