BRIEF
The brief was to create a range of greetings cards and gift dressings, including cards, notecards, gift bags, notebooks, and wrapping paper - taking into consideration the occasions/events and the target audience. I thought that this brief would give me the opportunity to produce pattern-based imagery and make work for a commercial purpose.
MARKET RESEARCH
I did some market research into companies such as Wrap Magazine, Oliver bonas, Paperchase, Kikki K, and Printed Peanut to give me an insight into stationery and gift trends. I noticed that these products tend to be marketed as collections, with overarching themes to make them cohesive. Trends that I picked up on were: textural and painterly patterns, geometric shapes, animals, and messages with a sense of h u m o u r.
INITIAL IDEAS
These are some of my initial roughs and media experimentations. I wanted to use characters and slogans to add playfulness and personality to the designs. My idea was to use hand drawn motifs in combination with textural paintings.
DEVELOPMENT
I produced textural backgrounds using acrylic paint and coloured pencils and drew the motifs using chinagraph pencils and started compiling my imagery using Photoshop. This opened up lots of possibilities in terms of altering colours, layering, and compositions, meaning that I produced several different versions of each design.
FINALS AND MOCK UPS
These are my 4 finished card designs, mocked up onto digital templates. This brief allowed me to experiment with m o t i f s , p a t t e r n , c o l o u r, a s w e l l a s t e x t i n the form of slogans, which I hadn’t done before. I also had to consider my designs would work as a set so I have used a consistent style and colour palette to create this coherence.
FINALS AND MOCK UPS
These are my designs for the wrapping p a p e r, b o x e d n o t e c a r d s , g i f t b a g a n d notebook. M y p l a y f u l u s e o f i m a g e r y, c o l o u r , a n d pattern was produced to fit my chosen audience of females aged 18-24. I enjoy that this brief gave me the opportunity to explore primarily pattern-based imagery and markmaking as a means of communication. It also required me to adapt my practice to produce designs for a commercial purpose.