Thursday 15 October 2015

OUGD504 - Brief 02 - Project Evaluation

Brief two was a great brief for me. I was a little anxious at the start, because other than the self branding brief for PPP last year, I had never designed a logo for a client/brand before, and next to no experience of working within brand restrictions. It was a massive learning curve for me, especially in gaining experience of communicating with a client and defining specific brand requirements. I knew straight away after selecting my Kickstarter project that I needed to design something bespoke; something that honestly reflected the brand. Fortunately, this allowed me to be true to my artistic background, experimenting with media such as paint and ink and collaging to get my ideas flowing.

My research for this brief was mainly secondary; this can be put down to time constraints and time management. The internet is a very useful resource as it is constantly updated and current, and I saw it as an effective research tool for this project. I used inspiration websites such as Pinterest, ItsNiceThat and BauBauHaus to fire up some inspiration. I tried to remain very specific in my visual research, in terms of the context of the brand and all that could be associated with it. I looked in depth at existing brands that have the same name as the farm I was designing for. I did this to see exactly how other designers tackled the theme of black sheep. I then went onto look at a range of farm logo designs from across America, the UK and Europe. This was useful in giving me inspiration. I noticed that a lot of farm logos shared similar design conventions and there were definitely running themes. For example, I noticed a large number of farm logos incorporated rounded sans serif, quite condensed typefaces. They also looked processed, edited to seem grungy/weathered or just ‘organic’.

I began by getting my primary ideas down onto paper, sketching designs out using marker pens, black drawing ink, acrylic paints, thick card and collaging techniques. This was really fun and refreshing way to approach a brief for me. I also found some marbelled paper at home and incorporated that into my initial design development.
Once I had generated a satisfactory number of ideas, I asked for feedback from my course mates. People said they really liked my vision to keep the designs illustrative rather than pure vectors. They said I could have also considered using hand rendered typography to compliment my illustrations. I took all of the feedback on board and used it to push the ideas forward.

I took the opportunity to contact the manager of the Kickstarter project personally via email. I was nervous about this, but hours after sending the first message I received a reply. I simply asked the ‘client’ if he had a vision for how he would like the logo to look. He was very helpful and gave me a number of pointers to work on. Opening up this dialogue with the client was very good for me in terms of building up my experience.

Talking with the client ultimately shaped my final design decisions.. After finishing the logo design I shifted my attention to the collateral. Here I wanted to keep things relevant and fresh to the modern consumer of farm products. So I decided to create a customer loyalty card and an advertisement poster. I wanted it to be fun and playful yet functional.

Overall I am very pleased with the amount of effort and time I dedicated to exploring analogue media/techniques. I definitely stuck to my creative roots during this brief, not feeling the need to conform to contemporary trends. I feel my final design answer the brief and the clients desires successfully.


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