SILHOUETTE, SURFACE & DETAIL

The drafting of Titan case shape variants allowed for a look at the individual cases in a way that was not biased to size. Having chartered out all the major case shapes produced at Titan, a design effort began to open a new chapter for Titan watches. Titan had moved from importing watches from China, to making its own watches and now after 30 years of producing watches on a quick product development cycle, it was going to set out to consolidate its own design DNA.

Since this part of the project will not be added in the document to respect client confidentiality, I wanted to pass on the the reader the process of how I went about this part of the design challenge since it can be a challenging task to set a design language and we do not have enough documents in our archives that really lay out the process to do so. The process of crafting a design language for Titan started with looking at the case shapes as alphabets. The design effort as to whole was looked at as though it was an exercise in crafting a new typeface. With all the different case shapes drafted out in plan, it was ease to look at each case as an individual character.

Gateway sheets were applied on top of the drafting sheets and black paint was used to paint the silhouettes of each case. Once the the silhouettes were extracted, they were laid out together and rescaled to work as letters in the same fashion that one would lay out type form. At this stage, one needs to resolve the forms to make them coherent with one another. You cannot start resolving the silhouette simply on the basis on what looks nice, it needs to be done in accordance to the company’s core values, history and promises. If there are too many different attributes that come from the value stage, one will need to sit with the client and resolve the brand until the attributes are actionable. One cannot do this on their own, the client has to spell these out. The branding exercise done in the chapters before will laid out some clarity in this respect but the design cues were resolved beyond the stage of the three brand stories, which again, cannot be shared at this point.

After silhouettes are resolved, one can move to surfaces and details, however it is essential that the key attributes start to reflect right from the silhouette stage and stay consistent as one details things out.

6

CREATING NEW USERS

To be able to effectively embed differentiation and harmony into a brand’s products, one has to start at the roots.

Design within a company takes the shape of the company’s ethos and core values. Thus clarity needed to be achieved to decipher these values and bring fresh clarity to the way that design could be practiced going forward.

Several methods were used to define the brand, its core attributes and these were synthesized into three story arcs. 01 ADOPTION STRATEGY - RAGA

How might Raga create newer consumers? Can design be leveraged to create adoption?

06 DESIGN DIRECTION

What can be inferred from the research and clarity exercises to guide new product development? 02 RAGA USER - CHANGING ATTITUDE

How has the existing Raga user evolved?

07 ADOPTION PLAN & DESIGN STORY

How might a design story be crafted to attract a the new potential consumer via future advertising campaigns?

11 INTERCHANGEABLE BEZEL

Unique bezel feature prosal for the new line of watches.

12 FIRST MANUFACTURE DRAFT

First draft from Titan’s New Product Development Team at the Hosur Factory.

03

04 ATTRIBUTES: RAGA USER (EXTREMES) & GAP S.W.O.T ANALYSIS

What do the current Raga design codes accommodate for at the moment? What is the user gap that can be explored to create adoption? What is the strength, weakness, opportunity and threats of the existing Raga portfolio? What are the highlights that shed insight for new product development?

08 MOODBOARD

Visually stimulating images to set the tone for design to be carried out based on emerging trends in related sectors.

09 IDEA DEVELOPMENT

Key Sketches and Quick prototypes to test idea feasibility. 05 TREND - BRANDS, STORES, USERS

What are the kind of products that one can see in stores? What new kinds of products have competing brands released in the last three months? What is the potential user’s state of mind with respect to new market entries?

10

FINAL DESIGN

Final product direction approved by all departments concerned with new product development.