The Problem?
The stores are cluttered, uninviting and overwhelming with stock. Displays are dated and have no personality to the products, which makes it hard for customers to make a decision. The tag line ‘helps you say it better’ is not shown anywhere in store, and the stores don’t reflect the quality of the products.
We decided to re-brand H.Samuel instead of just surface graphics, so we started with the logo. Myself and Luke experimented with a new logo and both came back with quite different approaches. I experimented with the weight, case and orientation of the logo and then the layout of it to give it a more up to date and friendly feeling.
My approach to this brief was to take it in more of a hand made direction. We started looking at the idea of using hand shapes to display the jewellery, so I started to develop this in my hand made style. I applied these initial ideas to promotional material and how they would look with the products. However when we came back together they didnt fit with our design direction so
I adjusted them to fit our style more. We decided to lazer cut the logos into perspex so that we could use these 3D pieces in developing our designs. I booked us into inductions and we both were able to experiment with the lazer cutter and perspex bender. We decided to use foil blocking on our products to give a really professional finish to them, so I used Lukes designs and
experimented foiling them which worked really well and gave our designs a great tactile quality to them.
We needed a new inventive way to display the products in the windows as it was too cluttered. We came up with the idea of using different size boxes that are adjustable and can fit together in different layouts. I mocked these up with cardboard and then further using mount board and assatate. This gave us a more realistic view of the space we had to play with and
graphics that could be applied. Influenced by the image at the bottom * I suggested that we use the patterns behind the perspex display stands, which worked really well. I would like to have developed this further and propsed a full window display using more of an influence from this image if I’d had more time.
One of the major turning points in our project was the final crit that we had with Graham. We realised that we had been too ambitious with the amount of work that we had proposed to do. We decided to focus on one aspect of the design which was the retail bags. We also re-designed the logo which related to our tone of voice. We designed a colour range aswell
that we applied to the bag and other promotional material. I also embroided the logo on to the ribbon of the bag to add a subtle finish to the bag. It was then easy to mock up the context of these designs.