OUGD503 Charlotte Walker
Studio Brief 3
Penguin was the first brief that I undertook for studio brief 1. It was the only competition at the time that had opened, so I was able to focus on it and give it my full attention. Looking at the 3 different books, I decided that I wanted to try and give myself a chance at winning the competition and went with what I thought would be the one with the least amount of entries, Emil and The Detectives. I’ve never had much experience designing for children until this brief, so I thoroughly researched into it. Looking at how books stand out on a shelf in a real life setting, to gaining inspiration from publications such as Anorak and Okido magazine. I also looked at previous children book cover winners, and found that they often use simpler, messier hand drawn techniques. As I’m not an illustrator by trade, I felt quite nervous drawing for the cover. My thoughts for the concept were to appeal to children by designing something that they can relate to, yet it being quite sophisticated and including elements from the story that you’ll only notice afterwards. The brief also stated that it should attract parents too, so the cover had to be appealing enough that parents would want their children to read it. The final resolution includes a lonely character wandering down a street, as the sun sets over the tall buildings. In the sky, money is drifting by, unbeknownst to this character which conveys a sense of dramatic irony to the reader. The pink and blue tones working together mean that this design isn’t gendered specifically, which gives me an advantage in the competition. Overall, I really enjoyed this brief and created something that I’m happy with. The final resolution is appropriate and fits the criteria set by Penguin. It has also shown me that my practice can be quite broad, and really influenced my practice by introducing me to children’s design - an avenue that I hadn’t previously thought about.
Penguin - Emil and The Detectives
After YCN had opened, I read through all of the briefs to see which one fit my design style best. I wanted to pick a brief that I had a good chance of winning and to me, this means picking a brief that I’m interested in, and can create immersive, unique design for. Feel Good stood out to me because they were purposefully ambiguous with their deliverables and how you went about the brief. They wanted their brand to appeal more to 18 - 35 year old women, and as I am my own target audience I felt compelled to create something that I was proud of, and that I would buy myself. Starting this brief was quite difficult. I had a lot of different ideas and approaches that I wanted to take. Researching into existing designs of sugar free fruit drinks proved that typography was extremely important in the design, but also displaying information to the consumer. I needed to design something that looked nice, yet delivered all of the key parts of the Feel Good brand. I started with a hand-rendered approach, but felt that it wasn’t really appropriate for my design practice. At this point in the brief, I really started to accept the way I design and didn’t want to push myself into something I wasn’t very good at and try to make it work. Using a more digital, vector approach I began to develop a concept that was engaging for the consumer. In my primary research, I found that the majority of 18 - 35 year old women were most attracted to bright colours and nice typography when looking to buy a fruit drink. My concept was to integrate these elements into an engaging design that promotes a healthy lifestyle. To fit with my concept, Feel Good needed a new design and brand image. I re-designed their logo which keeps with their requirement of “good honest fun”. Once I’d created the new logo, the rest of the design flowed from there. I had a lot of fun making this design, and I think that has shown through the
final resolution. The work that I have produced for this brief is professional, appropriate and the concept is engaging for the customer. To push the brief further, I also redesigned the Feel Good website and created an app to run alongside it. The website now fits with the current branding, and displays the information clearly and cohesively. There is also a section that lets consumers get involved in Feel Good allowing them to vote on new flavours for the drinks and other decision making for the brand. The Feel Good app runs alongside the website, promoting a healthy lifestyle in which your steps are counted throughout the day. You can connect with your friends and see who gets the most steps and earn points by walking over 10,000 steps a day to exchange for prizes and voucher codes. This brief has really solidified my design process and how I like to work. It’s allowed me to explore other techniques and highlight where my strengths are. I’m confident in my designs and deliverables for this competition, and hopefully coming out of this brief it will allow me to feel more confident in all work that I produce.
YCN - Feel Good Drinks
Secret 7 was a really refreshing brief for me in this module. It was a chance to create a piece of artwork that was aesthetically pleasing and nothing else. Having experience with Secret 7 before, I felt comfortable designing something that put form over function. I chose the song The Less I Know The Better by Tame Impala. Their distorted, disorientating style of music would be a great starting point for their artwork. I looked into the meaning of the song, and created two designs that fit with this, but also remained secretive. Experimenting with different design styles was liberating, and it meant I could create designs at both end of the spectrum and still keep them appropriate to the brief. I experimented with new techniques to create the 2nd image. I used photography, pixel sorting and lots of distortion to create this design. I wanted to broaden my range of techniques and convey a sense of surrealism. The first design is used with vectors, which is the process in which I’m more comfortable. The angle I took with this was to create a landscape which looks inviting and exciting at first, but then you realise how barren and dangerous it can be. Overall, Secret 7 was quite a short brief for me and I had fun with it. It was a breath of fresh air amongst all of the larger briefs that needed lots of planning and structure.
Secret 7
Love Arts Festival is a celebration of creativity and mental well-being in Leeds. My design aims to create a calming, natural scene to correlate with the idea of mental-wellbeing and hopefully come across as friendly and approachable. As a small brief the idea was developed over one afternoon which was ideal for the worklode of the module.
Love Arts Festival
For the collaborative brief I was contacted by an Illustrator after the presentation/mixer asking whether I would like to work with her. I was quite surprised by this as I wasn’t expecting anyone to contact me! I felt that her work was quite similar to my style, and she also mentioned that she had some animation experience. I had already agreed to work with Emily Patrick from graphic design, so we decided to meet and analyse our skills and what benefits we could each bring to the team before deciding on a brief. We all had different skills to compliment each other, and a similar working style. We looked through the briefs that we were all interested in Monotype, Design Bridge, Fever tree etc, but we realised that a lot of them weren’t suitable for both Illustration and Graphic Design. After looking at a lot of different briefs, Adobe caught our eye. It was very relaxed with the guidelines and how we created the campaign, the only “rule” being we had to keep the shape of the existing creative cloud logo. The brief was to create a campaign to inspire young creatives and make Adobe Creative Cloud appeal to them more. As our target audience was effectively ourselves, we had some ideas of how this could happen.
Over time our concept developed, though I feel it lost some of it’s meaning. Fennell was in charge of Illustrating the landscapes and this took a lot of time.
Once the illustrations were ready, we only had a week to complete the actual deliverables, mock them up and produce a video to submit to D&AD. We decided to go forward with 3 of the characters, The Builder, Explorer and Inventor. This would be our tagline for the campaign to reinforce the characters, since in the completed illustrations they were quite small and didn’t seem very relevant in the end. We also had some issues with The Inventor illustrations as they didn’t seem quite suitable to being an inventor. We were very pushed for time at this point, so we had to go forward with it, although myself and Emily expressed multiple times it was moving away from the original concept. The final designs consisted of 6 illustrations. Overall we’ve created some strong visual work, though the concept is lacking in consistency.
D&AD - Adobe
Our first meeting was to discuss initial ideas. We felt that making the cloud look easy to use was something important we needed to convey. Students need to feel that the cloud is worth the subscription, and they should feel relaxed and confident when using the software. We also wanted to inspire them, and make them feel like the cloud is essential to their own practice as a developing artist. To do this, we wanted to embed the logo in all of our designs. Our initial concept was to create vast, exciting landscapes within the logo to give a sense of discovery to the viewer - like anything was possible through using the cloud.
While me and Emily felt our concept was solid and ready to be created, Fennell was developing the idea by herself. She came to us with more ideas about how to connect with the viewer by using some characters that relate to specific software. The Builder, Inventor, Explorer and Producer were some of what she suggested. We felt this concept would benefit our campaign and we could embed these characters within the landscapes to give it some narrative.