OUIL503 - John Lewis initial sketches

I began sketching out some ideas for the layout of the first box lid and just playing around with some textures and colour schemes. I made the textures with watercolour paint and intended to scan them in to draw on top of them digitally.
I found that my drawing improved a lot when I used a reference image to look at whilst drawing, which is something I often forget to do.
I was originally going to use these images to turn into patterns, but then I started playing around with making patterns digitally, and then we decided to scrap the idea of using patterns, so these never really got used.

OUIL503 - Responsive - Research into John Lewis

Value, quality and choice

We are committed to attracting, retaining and deepening relationships with our customers. We want to build their confidence in our reputation for quality, price and service.

At John Lewis value is about more than price, it's also shown in the quality of our products and our expert, highly professional service.

Sustainability has been a cornerstone of our business right from the Partnership's establishment. Today we continue to take a long-term view, build mutually beneficial relationships and act in the interests of society.

All John Lewis's adverts try to communicate a sense of nostalgia through their colour palettes which are quite subtle and soft. It's very targeted towards a British market and often uses iconic British imagery to provoke a feeling of nationality. I don't know what it is about the John Lewis adverts but they always seem to make me cry? I'm a pretty emotional person but it must be something within their adverts that taps into the viewers emotions, specially with the She's Always A Woman advert.

OUIL505 - Illustration 2 - Project Proposal Peer Review

Comment on the clarity of the project rationale. To what extent have the aims and objectives of the project been clearly stated?

Good focus on final product and what you want to communicate.
Try to decide early on the types of scents you will use so you underpin visual journal imagery.

Comment on the identified themes and subjects outlines in the proposal. To what extent do they offer sufficient scope for research and development of significant/appropriate content.

Good concept of ecological products
This will be interesting to visualise but difficult to make unique, how will you do this?

Comment on the proposed practical and conceptual application outlined in the proposal. Is it clear and does it offer the potential to develop a significant body of work?

Good understanding of how you will apply the work by print and the problems you face.
Why not look at gift packs/labels/business branding?

Comment on the breadth and appropriateness of the contextual references. To what extent are they informing the decisions regarding product, range and methods of distribution?

Notice what works well on existing products, but notice the qualities in your own work to make it stand out!

Comment on the proposed project plan. To what extent is the plan realistic with regards to workload and timescales?

Good start of visual development.
Again, underpin scents early on so you can focus on certain imagery
Test on eco friendly stock/recycled paper.



Comment on the clarity of the project rationale. To what extent have the aims and objectives of the project been clearly stated?

You have identified what audience you are aiming your products at, as well as where they can buy it - It is very clear what you intend to do at this stage.

Comment on the identified themes and subjects outlines in the proposal. To what extent do they offer sufficient scope for research and development of significant/appropriate content.

They offer a lot of possibilities for direction, you may have many options in terms of research because these products can be packaged in many ways.. through visual investigation you can select a range of outcomes.

Comment on the proposed practical and conceptual application outlined in the proposal. Is it clear and does it offer the potential to develop a significant body of work?

It can be significant if you look into all of the products you are proposing to package. i think your audience works because the shops you will be selling products from do champion tasteful packaging.

Comment on the breadth and appropriateness of the contextual references. To what extent are they informing the decisions regarding product, range and methods of distribution?

They inform your ideas well. It is good to see relevant research/stuff with a similar one of voice because it is easy to picture your work in context.

Comment on the proposed project plan. To what extent is the plan realistic with regards to workload and timescales?

Workload is ambitious enough I think - because you have a number of products to look at, so you will need to research individual approaches to packaging e.g. body scrub and lip balm have different packaging. Depending on your work rate it will be challenging but manageable.

Additional comments and suggestions

Lovely ideas at this stage, visually appealing, I love your visual journal patterns. keep it up!

After my peer review I decided that to make my product range unique and to help it stand out, I intend to theme all the products around Yorkshire, specifically places in Yorkshire and the wildlife and plant life. I think this will help give the products a unique selling point and also more of a context.

OUIL505 - Textures and Pattern

OUIL505 - Initial Proposal

Project
I intend to look deeper into product and packaging in order to create my own range of 'organic' beauty products, I want to aim my product range at a more adult female audience, as I feel this audience would be most interested in an organic product range.
To help me with my range I want to visit different retail outlets that sell similar products, like Harvey Nichols and John Lewis.


Product Range
I want to create a packaged beauty range including

• Soap in illustrated packaging
• Hand cream
• Body scrub
• Lip balm

I intend to but plain packaging for the beauty products and then create illustrated labels and additional packaging to create a unified range. I want to create an interesting box design that could be kept and used after with a different purpose.

I also want to try creating patterns and printing onto textiles such as cloths.

Themes

• Organic
• Mature
• Nature
• Beauty
• Feminine

OUIL503 - Responsive - Secret 7

For the Secret 7 Brief I decided to submit two different designs, one for the song Born Slippy and the second for Let Forever Be

I decided to submit the second picture as I thought the first one was too busy and cluttered. I enjoyed creating the line work and then layering it up on top of the background, creating patterns as backgrounds is something I am becoming more interested in. 

I also submitted this design for Born Slippy, I wanted to try more of a collage effect using layered colours and patterns. Although I was pleased with this final design, it didn't turn out exactly how I wanted it to look. I wanted to convey more of a layered effect, which I think would have been easier to achieve if I had not done this work digitally.

I quite enjoyed this brief, because I like the challenge of trying to communicate the feel of a song through images. Although looking at some of the other entries, they were a lot more abstract and didn't really link to the songs much, so I think a lot of people went for whether the image looked nice rather than if it made sense. 

EDIT 02/04/2015

My Born Slippy design got accepted yay!!

OUIL503 - Responsive - Initial thoughts.

Our priorities in regards to this brief are as follows:

- We must decide the scale, amount and material of each proposed delivery box.

- The overall tone of voice which best describes that of John Lewis as a brand.

- How we can create an emotional bond with the customer through our designs.

- How we can keep communicating effectively with each other to keep work flow going at a steady pace.

How we will achieve these:

- We will research into John Lewis's products and create a wide range of designs that are best suited for the product range. We will decide on how many designs we will create depending on time constraints and our personal work load. We will also research into materials that we have access to that are environmentally friendly, and also look into possible new materials that we could source.

- The tone of voice that we will communicate through our designs will come from researching what John Lewis has done in the past and improving upon this. We need to integrate our own way of working into the aesthetic qualities that John Lewis uses.

- Using themes from John Lewis's past marketing techniques and putting our own twist on them will help us best create an emotional connection with the customer, as we know that it has worked well for the company in the past.

- We will keep in contact often through short meetings and discussions in the studio but also through social media, such as a Facebook group where we can post ongoing work and talk to each other about ideas.

Additional considerations

- We have agreed that it is best to split joint costs throughout the project, for things such as printing, but if we require things for ourselves at any time we should pay for this by ourselves. We should always discuss any joint costs before we actually spend anything.

- If we are finding it hard to come to an agreement on a design we will ask for feedback which will help us decide. We have split the workload fairly equally, taking parts of the brief that we will each enjoy doing. 

- We have decided that we need to set interim deadlines for ourselves to ensure that we don't miss the final deadline by falling behind. 

OUIL503 - Responsive - Contract of Agreement

OUIL503 - J2O Submission

I found the YCN submission quite stressful, because I kept worrying about whether I got everything in the correct order, about my spelling and if I had included everything. The process of creating the boards themselves wasn't too hard, and I found it easier to explain my work through images rather than with words, as is usually the case when I'm blogging. I think my boards themselves give quite a good idea of my project and how I arrived at the finished point, I'm pleased with how they turned out and I think they make quite an impact.

OUIL505 - Flowers

Because I'm looking further into product and packaging, I've decided I want to create a cosmetic collection, including soap, hand lotion and a body scrub. I've started out by exploring texture and beginning to think about how I would make the packaging unique and stand out.

OUIL505 - Leading Questions

What do you already know?

I am interested in looking into the product and packaging category, mainly at pattern and texture. I know that I want to create some sort of product range, possibly cosmetic, including soaps and scrubs.

What do you want to know more about?

I want to further investigate types of packaging and their context. I need to decide definitely what product range I want to create and start researching around that.

What will you do to find out about it?

I will go to department stores like Harvey Nichols to research my target audience and gain inspiration from existing packaging

What themes are you interested in exploring?

-Organic products

-Cosmetics

-Pattern

What texts have you been exploring?

I have been reading two product and packaging books from the library. I intend to look at more books exploring surface pattern.

OUIL505 - Software Session

How colour is defined in a Photoshop image.

RGB - Colour mode for screen
CMYK - Colour mode for print

RGB is Photoshop's default mode, a lot of the features won't work when working in CMYK mode.

Gamut warning highlights pixels that won't print correctly if you don't convert to CMYK.

Using the magic wand tool to select certain parts of the image in order to adjust it.

The colour range tool helps you to select an exact part of an image, like an advanced magic wand tool.

Parts of the image highlighted in white will be selected, which gives you more control over what you want to be selected.

You can use the colour range tool to select only pixels that are out of the gamut range.

OUIL505 - Study Task 1 - Research

Jon Mcnaught

Jon Mcnaught often creates narratives around locations, made from notes he has made in his phone whilst travelling during the day. His three graphic novels, Dockwood, Birchfield Close and Pebble Island are all inspired by places he has previously lived.

Jon Mcnaught's work inspires me mainly because he doesn't use a lot of text in his comics, but still conveys a clear narrative, I'm not very good at working with words within a narrative, so it inspires me to try and create narratives through just image alone. His limited colour palette is also something that inspires my work, I want to try and restrict myself to only a certain amount of colours that compliment each other to create a continuous aesthetic throughout my work.

Jesse Jacobs

Jesse Jacobs is an artist an illustrator, mainly a cartoonist.

“I have a day job; it’s part-time. I work at an organic food co-op. There’s a lot of driving on country roads, going to farms, and picking up things to bring them other places. When I come up with a basic idea—it usually starts with an image in my sketchbook—I’ll develop the story very loosely, to keep the freedom to include any sort of wild imagery I can muster up and draw. In the new book, two people are on a safari in a weird landscape, and anything can happen, and does. In comics, it can be daunting when you come up with ideas and then you have to draw them—so I try to keep the story loose and let it develop so it’s fun for me to draw, or else I’ll never finish a book.”

Again it is mainly the limited colour palette's that Jesse uses that I want to try and incorporate into my own work. All the colours seem to compliment each other and are quite similar. He uses one bright colour to create a focal point within each image.

Jefferson Cheng

Jefferson Cheng is a San Francisco based designer and illustrator focusing on print, identity, and interactive work with a range of clients, big and small. He is also currently a designer at Google.

The main aspect of Cheng's work that stands out to me is the bold shape combined with the colour. His work is a lot more Graphic than what I would normally look at, but I think this style of work is something I'd be interested in looking further into during the next modules.

Anja Mulder

Hi,

My name is Anja Mulder and i am a photographer and illustrator based in Groningen, the Netherlands.

I think that the way Anja presents here work when she is photographing it really helps to push her chosen aesthetic, it feels like she considers every aspect of her work and how its surroundings will affect the way it is perceived. I like her use of collage and how she combines different materials with 3d objects to communicate a tone of voice.

Joan Cornella

Joan Cornellà Vázquez (born 11 January 1981) is a Spanish cartoonist and illustrator, famous for his unsettling, surreally humorous and blackly humorous comic strips as well as artwork.

Similar to Jefferson Cheng's work, the bold colour and simple shapes work well together. He also never uses speech in his comics, and conveys narrative through simple and direct images in each panel. I like that his work is so humorous and dark, and the short narratives within the comics work well with this.

OUIL503 - J2O Final Designs

For the final designs I altered one of my other designs, as I had hit quite a wall with developing ideas. In the feedback crits I was told that my original designs were best, so I chose to develop one of those into my final design. 

I added colour using a collage technique, using different opacity's of lines and block colour. The one thing that I didn't like about my other designs was the font's, so I went back to my original idea and created a hand drawn type instead. I think this fitted much more with the tone I was trying to communicate. Although in the brief the company said that the existing J2O design was seen as chavvy as it was too brightly coloured, I think that the colour I used worked well, as it had more of a context, to show people the flavour of the drink and that it was a blend of two fruits. 

If I were to do this brief again I would probably spend less time on it, and give myself a much more concise time frame to complete it in, so that I wouldn't end up getting bored of it, which is what happened this time. 

OUIL503 - Responsive - J2O Ideas

I began just testing ideas using actual fonts rather than hand drawn ones, although I think that some of them work, I think that I should go back to using more simple colour schemes, such as just black and white. I like using white text against a brightly coloured background, I think it's a more 'adult' way of adding colour, because although J2O said that their existing products were seen as tacky because they were brightly coloured, I think that if done well, colour can add to a design rather than make it seem tacky.

OUIL503 - Responsive -J2O Peer Feedback Crit

I found this crit really useful, it confirmed for me that creating a beer bottle type design definitely fit the intended target audience and also helped me realise specific requirements that I need to take into consideration, like the printing finish and whether or not I should use colour or keep it black and white.


List 5 Strengths and give reasons why you think this.
1. Lots of research. Looked into designs and possible printing methods (ink on glass)
2. Knowledge of brief (requirements)
3. Suitable for target audience (beer designs)
4. Ideas - looked into possible colours etc.
5. Thoughts of getting primary research.

List 5 areas for improvement and give reasons why you think this.
1. Research legalities? What info do labels have to include?
2. Look into dimensions - will help when putting the labels onto bottles.
3. Types of printing - Screen printing etc.
4. What finish? Matte, gloss?

List 5 questions that you think need answering.. How will this help?
1. Sizes/ dimensions of labels?
2. Colour scheme? Pastels/solids?
3. What printing techniques will you use?

Comment on the proposed concept/response in relation to the brief?
Strengths:
Definite route of being current through typography, colour and composition.
Suggestions:
Review nmore earlier ideas - more illustrative

Comment on the extent to which the proposed response solves the identified problem
Strengths:
Made less colourful, simplified cool designs - appeals to the audience better.
Shown how your designs can be applied onto product.
Suggestions:
Research and mock up how your design will look on the bottle.

Comment on the appropriateness of the response to the identified audience/context.
Strengths:
Nailed it.
Suggestions:
Certain text may be too young? the thinner text works better alongside the logo.

Comment on the visual quality/content in relation to the proposed response.
Strengths:
Some are really strong.
Suggestions:
Experiment more with colour and typography - more contextual referencing.
Decide on a final design to run with.


I found this crit really useful, it confirmed for me that creating a beer bottle type design definitely fit the intended target audience