Today was the first part of the packaging brief. A member of staff from the library called Dan came in and spoke to us about his business, called ‘Willow and Wax’. It is a business that creates beard oil, candles and homemade/hand made wicker baskets. The aim of the brief is to basically rebrand his business, with a logo, and packaging ideas whether that is on the bottle or whether that is the actual outer packaging that the objects can be put into.

These are 10 different packaging examples that I found on google images, which I really love because they were so unique and different and if felt as if they did give me quite a bit of inspiration.

There are also 10 different brands that went through a rebrand, the most obvious one which I didnt actually think of was Instagram. They went through a logo change, and brought out a selection of apps to help with people posting images to instagram to make them a little bit more creative and their page appealing.

 

These are the notes that I wrote down from the speech that Willow and Wax company gave us to help with his packaging brief.

• Packaging to stand out
• Natural is the buzzword
• No waste
• Affordability
• There is no gender specific in the buying, or market research
• Sustainable
• Recyclable
• Personal approach
• Vegan
• Cheap materials
• Orange & Rosemary Candle = best selling product
• Wicker Basket = least selling
• The business is on Etsy, and a website but the two aren’t linked
• Can look into art and craft fairs – mostly where items are being bought
• Can look at the materials library

 

I did research the layout of the website and the Etsy page.

I dont like the photography being used, I feel as if it is not professional enough in my opinion, and I studied photography for 4 years so I know what I am talking about in regards to that.

 

Today was just presenting our work infront of our peers.

I did feel embarrassed by my work because of how bad my drawings are, and how everyone else have these amazing drawing skills and I have next to nothing so it does make me feel down about my ability. I know that I am amazing at photo editing, and layout, and I am going at doing the digital aspects of design. I just know I am not good at the hand drawn exercises.

As I didn’t have my laptop for the two weeks of this brief, unforeseeable circumstances. One of my peers spilt lucozade all over my MacBook, and the machine was written off. This was a problem that I faced because it made me extremely behind in my work, I had to share the home computer with my brother who is doing his GCSE which is equally as important in the work that I am doing. I felt as if it did create a massive effect on my work, and the ability and standards because it wasn’t a very nice experience. i felt like due to this experience, my work did suffer massively, and because I am quite behind in this brief, I know its going to affect me for the rest of the briefs to come because I will be too focused on trying to catch up, to worry about the new work which is being given to me,

None of my peers said anything bad about my work, they did actually like it. They thought the characters were fun, which is the main thing.

 

Today was using the drawing I scanned into the computer, and digitalising them on Illustrator. This was hard as I didnt know how to use illustrator, but I figured out and I really enjoyed this step. I was doing a lot of experimentations, with colour and effects.

These are my final drawings:

 

 

I don’t want to evaluate this on todays blog because I know the  evaluation will be on Thursday so I want to be able to have something to write about.

 

Today our tutor was going around doing small table critiques to help us with our idea of what to do for our illustrations. I did find this really hard because I am not an illustrator, I am not good at drawing and unfortunately I didnt have a computer to be able to work on due to unfordable circumstances. One of my peers spilt lucozade all over my MacBook, and the machine was written off. This was a problem that I faced because it made me extremely behind in my work, I had to share the home computer with my brother who is doing his GCSE which is equally as important in the work that I am doing. I felt as if it did create a massive effect on my work, and the ability and standards because it wasn’t a very nice experience.

This are some of the drawings that I created, I draw them and scanned them into the computer.

My idea was creating cartoon characters for children, and having them look odd and strange, to share a message that everyone is different, no one is the same, and that it doesn’t matter about the appearances of anyone. It is what is inside that actually counts.

 

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These are scanned PDFs as I unforantely lost the small book that I was drawing my ideas off. So I am lucky I had been scanning them in. I draw more than the expected 7 because I was playing with ideas. I used continuous line drawing because I am not a good drawer, and I felt I would be more confident if I didnt take the pencil of the paper, and kept drawing and created an animal character in that way. Therefore, I was working with my complete imagination, and not putting pressure on the drawing and overthinking the process which I would normally do.

 

Today we was doing Soofs Drawing Workshop. This was were we had to sit on a table with paper, and she was saying random words and we had to draw the first shape that came into our head when she was saying these words. I did find this quite tricky, and thats more because I feel embarrassed as a drawer as I am so weak at this. This is a skill that I really want to try and improve on, but it is finding the time to do this, and trying to learn what is the best possible way to do this.

The second exercise was choosing a second pen, of a different colour and width, and be able to draw with each the two pens at the same time, or add the colour afterwards. This exercise was actually drawing certain objects.

The third exercise we had to pass a piece of paper around the table, my table was a table of 3, and we draw over each others word randomly. This was interesting to see what type of creations we would actually come up with.

The fourth and final exercise of the workshop was to create a zine or a book, which tells a story. The theme that the group was given was ‘Under The Sea’, and all the zines/books had to relate to that in some way. Our group decided to merge to different animals together as we thought it was creative and fun.

The second part of the session after break was to create a mind map for ‘What is Beauty’, and to try and think of ideas to do in relation to the brief.

Today was a trip to the V&A.

These are the photographs that I took from around the museum that I liked. I am thinking of doing some drawing responses to some of them when I get home so that I can try too improve my drawing skills.

 

These are my favourite photographs that I took at the V&A museum. This is because they spoke to me,  I really did enjoy looking at different kinds of artworks that wasn’t on the screen or on paper. Its nice to look at things are may not be deemed artwork to myself, but in the eyes of art they are. I am just not used to this sort of artwork to be able to see it in a museum, it really opens up my thoughts about the creative industry itself, but also the topic of which our project is about which is ‘what is beauty’.

I will include the sketchbook page in this blog as to show what I have done.

 

The drawing were very hard because I am not a strong drawer, and I feel like I might have chosen the wrong drawings to draw as admittedly they did seem simpler when I was choosing what I would draw.

Today was a day that was cut short due to an issue at the university where we had to leave half way through the session due to having no water in the building. We weren’t going to have a studio day until Thursday because we are going on a trip tomorrow to the V&A.

The task was to research 10 different illustrators. There was no specific type of illustrators that we were supposed to find, as we don’t know what the project is going to be about, and therefore we could find anything that we liked.

These were the 10 different illustrators that interested me:

1. Alan Baker
2. Asun Balzola
3. Coco Zool
4. Jacqueline Bissett
5. Lev Kaplan
6. Lukas Bischoff
7. Matthew Robson
8. May Van Millingen
9. Ollie Maxwell
10. Sarah Beetson

The photographs below are my favourite images from the illustrators. I have named them correctly in my sketch book as I thought it would be easier than doing it on the blog as you can’t copy and paste images onto the blog otherwise it crashes. I have saved all the images singularly and then uploading them that way.

 

After the Christmas break, we are put into random groups with people from the different pathways – 3D, Fashion Promotion, Fashion Textiles, Media Production and then Visual Communication Design. This did make me anxious because I didn’t know how the week was going to go, whether I would have a good group with people that actually wanted to do work, or if I would get along with the people in my group. However, the week did go really well. Our group worked really well together, we was able to communicate about everything in a well manner, we spilt all the jobs up so we all had equal responsibility.

The objective behind the week was to create a collective, it would off been not so much a party, but like a happening, or an experience for everyone to enjoy. We wouldn’t be actually physically creating it, we are just planning the experience. I think a behind objective to the week was to try and get to know people in the different pathways, try and make new friends with them.

We created a mind map of our interests to try and get to know each other, and what we would all be interested in doing our project about.

This was our mind map of what we wanted our idea to be:

The roles are at the bottom of the work.

We focused our project on ‘Control through society’, this was the mission statement:

We are aiming to convey governmental control through photography/GIF, brought upon us through technology; how we are constantly being watched and controlled in our everyday life. Every person’s life is fixed, controlled or being watched in some way. However, everyone has a different version of this because no one lives the same life. For example, the life of a school child is completely different from someone in the working class. Personal lives also have an effect on this.

We are going to be using photography as the main outcome, as photography can be extremely powering and graphic. This way it is also easier for the audience to imagine and understand the experience of control in a social environment.

As a physical feature, we will be making a cube that has all the photographs that we have created and edited so that it can be interactive for the audience.

Technological control whether forced upon us, or self inflicted determines everyone’s everyday life  

I created the LOGO for our project which we named ourselves ‘ISPY’. I created it on illustrator, which was a little bit hard as I am still new to the software.

I also created photography using pixelated webcam sort effect. These are the photography edits that I created.

This week is the industry week. I combined both of the days together and I am writing this after the week has been completed as during the week I had the graphic design interview which took around an hour out of the day, but also I was unable to come in on the Thursday as I really was unwell and therefore, as the day was the presentation day, I didn’t have any of the work to do. However, I did send my group the work that I did do, which I will include at the end of this blog.

The industry week was about a company called ‘Library of Things’, and through this we had to basically recreate the brand. The only thing that we were allowed to keep the same was the name, and everything else was allowed to be rebranded. I thought the topic was actually really interesting, and a lot of research actually went into learning about what the Library of Things was.

Library of Things is a organisation that allows the community to come together and borrow equipment. This might be a hoover, or a waffle maker, a hammer or other tools. Things that we wouldn’t use everyday, and therefore wouldn’t really want to go out and buy them from the store for a one time use. The company has three different subscriptions to choose from, and then you pay each month, and then you pay to borrow some equipment. I do think that the strategy is a bit poor, because the slogan is ‘ Why buy when you can borrow’, it suggest that you won’t need to pay money to use the service, or to borrow certain equipment so I feel as if the slogan gives out the wrong message.

The colour scheme we used, we the same colour scheme that the company already had. We thought we would keep the colour the same because the business already has a gradually growing business, and by changing the colour it might confused some of the older customers.

Everyone in our group spilt the jobs up, and my job was to create some posters, which can be put onto billboards, or put onto social media pages to try and promote the company.

There was a powerpoint that everyone contributed work onto throughout the course of the 2 days, and then it was shown during the presentation on Thursday which I wasn’t in on.

Today was a critique of all of our work. The work was put up as an exhibition on the purple boards.

 

 

This is what my exhibition looked like.

As a own personal review, I felt like I could do a lot more with his brief, but as I was slightly behind in my sketchbook, and realising I have fallen quite behind which is no fault but my own (apart from quite a lot of printing errors), I felt I was a little distracted with the process of my sketchbook than the actual brief. I am going to be getting my sketchbook up to scratch so that from January when we come back, my work is going to be so much better, and I am going to make sure blogs and work will be done on the day and then I am more able to create extra work during my days off.

These are the points I got from my peers:

• I researched into directions
• I designed a system which can be applied to other companies as well as Ravensbourne University
• Good colour choice and contextualising of the building and the lines
• Make some more mock ups on how you want other lines to be if I was to create more lines for the different buildings around the area.

 

The last part of the session was looking at work that the tutors thought was good and listening to my peers talk about them. This was interesting to see how other people that weren’t in my group went about the brief.

I have realised my work hasnt been to the best of my ability, and I am struggling coming to terms with that because I feel like I have let myself down. However I am going to improve on this because this isn’t how I work, and hasnt been how I worked before.