The Chartered Society of Designers Need Your Help!

So for those of you who aren’t aware of the CSD, they are, to quote their website ‘the professional body for designers and the authority on professional design practice.’ Basically the CSD assesses designers and if they and their portfolio are deemed good enough, they are awarded membership into the society.

Anyway they want you, yes you, to help them by filling in the survey below. It will take 10 minutes and give you a nice warm happy glow!

CSD Survey

Thank you

Falmouth Unversity: Final Year Show 2013

This year, as always, the Falmouth University Graphic Design show boasts a plethora of brilliant and varied ideas and solutions. I’ve selected a few of my favourite pieces of work to try and capture a glimpse of the talent but I would fully recommend seeing the show over the next few days. All the work will also be available to view here from the beginning of next week.

Chulley Evans

One piece of work that really stood out to me was Chulley Evans‘ poster campaign for Douwe Egberts. The brief was to advertise Douwe Egberts to a younger target market and Chulley decided to focus her campaign on the relationship between coffee lovers and their coffee. She showed this loyalty with a really simple visual play on a coffee cup handle becoming a wedding ring. This is reinforced by her choice of copy which works really nicely in both the context of vows and for coffee.

Emma Chilcott

I love Emma Chilcott‘s response to the D&AD brief to design the packaging for four scents from L’Artisan Parfumeur, each capturing a different emotion. Emma created L’Art de L’Emotion – a range of perfume paints that can be mixed to express your emotions using colour and scent. I think her solution is a really elegant outcome for quite an intricate brief.

Trevor Thompson 

 

Trevor Thompson‘s book cover design for Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep also caught my eye. I think this cover achieves a good balance between engaging the viewer without giving away too much of the plot. It gradually acquires further meaning as the book is read – whilst some women in the book may prove to be key to unlocking information in the case, others may be concealing far more deadly secrets.

Anthony Goodison

One really simple but effective solution was Anthony Goodison‘s campaign for the Feel Good Drinks Company. Anthony took well known positive phrases and used the urban environment to engage with viewers and bring a smile to their day.

Conor Dorsett

Conor Dorsett decided to tackle the jkr juice competition to brand and package a global urban beekeeper’s products. Conor focused his branding on how urban honey is shaped by the city it is created in, this he showed very simply by forming city skylines out of honey drops. I think this outcome would be really effective on shelf as the skylines would align and create the impression of an entire city.

Sarah Knight

Sarah Knight tackled the same Douwe Egberts brief as Chulley, above, but with a completely different outcome. Sarah focussed on redesigning the coffee’s packaging to bring it, quite literally, into the home. I think Sarah’s designs work really nicely as a set and would be really hard to resist!

Paul Ransom

Along the same lines as being hard to resist, I really liked Paul Ransom‘s Duracell redesign. Paul has created a different personality for each battery type based on their size and nature of use.

Josie Evans

Josie Evans‘ self initiated brief was to create a campaign to highlight issues surrounding food wastage as well as providing cheap and easy solutions to the problem. Josie created a clever sleeve to fit over various products to show just how much is wasted out of each item bought. Each sleeve contains a recipe that could be made using the potentially wasted product, if all of the sleeves are collected they can be arranged to create a full poster with various facts and information about food wastage. I love how many different levels there are to Josie’s outcome think it is a really effective and practical solution.

A Limited Edition Viral.

The pull of something being ‘limited edition’ is a route that’s been explored by almost every well known brand. People swarm on short-time products that offer an unusual flavour, colour or even just a different type of packaging. When you think about it it’s a really odd way of appealing to people, why is it that we want to find a taste we enjoy only for it to leave our shelves after a few weeks?

There are a few different reasons this method works, firstly by adding time pressure you’re far more likely to encourage an ‘impulse buy.’ Then, you’re adding in the incentive of being the first to try something, the consumer becomes special, one of a ‘select few.’ Finally you tempt the buyer that your product will become a collectable item (although this incentive is most applicable to the limited edition bottle designs or non-consumable examples.)

Many brands exploit our inquisitive natures and use a limited edition sample to test how viable the product is. If it’s a success they then go on to release the same product later in the year, normally with people celebrating the return of an item they missed rather than by calling them out on the broken ‘limited edition’ promise.

However, one thing I’ve never seen before is limited edition advertising – Or, perhaps more intriguingly, a limited edition ‘viral.’ Now that’s a complete contradiction in terms but it seems that’s exactly what  Clemenger BBDO Melbourne have attempted with this video for Cascade First Harvest. They’ve created a video that can only be seen 5000 times, for an experimental beer that they’ve only made 5000 cases of. It’s a very risky strategy but I think it’s a really interesting idea.

There are only 130 views left, click here to be one of them.

(I would have liked to insert the video there but I’m having a few technological difficulties – sorry!)

Looking at design from a different angle – A brilliant campaign to stop Child Abuse

There aren’t many adverts out there that are appreciated by the general public. Adverts have been given a bad name from the plethora of rubbish out there selling ‘Foxy Bingo’ and ‘Injury Lawyers 4 U’ however one recently has been recommended to me by two different (non-design) people and shared all over my facebook page so I figured it must be worth a post!

Grey Spain have designed a poster for the children’s charity ‘Fundacion Anar’ which reveals a hidden message when viewed by a child. They have used a technique called lenticular printing which means that they can show different images from different angles and so have added beating marks, a helpline and an additional supporting line of copy that can only be seen by people smaller than the average 10 year old’s height. The thinking behind this is that it will mean adults will not disuade their children from calling the helpline or stop the children from looking at the poster.

The only problem is that this has been almost too-well received and due to all the publicity people will probably recognise the poster as the one with the hidden message! That said, I think it’s a really simple and clever solution to a very difficult problem.

 

Design with a Purpose – Identity for the McGuire Programme

A few days ago I came across this really neat identity Purpose have designed for The McGuire Programme, which is an organisation set up to provide therapeutic coaching to people with stutters or stammers.

I’m often a fan of logos that use negative space but it’s rare to see one that works this simply and effectively. It’s one of those solutions that now it’s been done you really can’t imagine it as anything else, it just works so well! Even down to the bottom speech bubble having two leads perfectly representing a stutter.

This identity also gave them a simple speech bubble holding device which transferes easily across all applications of the brand ensuring consistency and flexibility.

Introducing additional visual plays with the speech bubble adds dynamism and a touch of wit to the brand and works really nicely with the bold brand language and imagery.

And we see how the whole thing pulls together in their brand guidelines showing various plays on the speech bubble but always keeping the consistant feel, tone and colour scheme.

A lovely bit of work, found via Purpose’s website where you can read a bit more about it too!

EDIT.

I’ve just been directed to a brilliant talk by Nathan Webb and Sean Rees, the designers who both nominated The McGuire Programme as a worthy cause for Purpose to do some free work for, and also thought up the winning concept. It’s a really inspiring talk and if anyone has 30 minutes I’d really recommend watching it.

Thank you Lauren Tooze for the heads up!

Point Conference – Authenticity in design from Purpose projects on Vimeo.

 

The best ideas seem the simplest – A brilliant campaign from Ogilvy for Expedia

I’ve been meaning to write this post for a while now (well, about 4 months but let’s not worry about that!) having first seen these adverts on It’s Nice That back in January, but with one thing and another that didn’t happen so I’m sorry if this is all old news to you! Why not just take a minute to appreciate the genius of them again?

Created by Ogilvy for Expedia, I believe the whole campaign stemmed from them seeing a lady walking around the airport with ‘FUK’ on her luggage tag and finding this pretty funny, from this they wondered what other words or sentences were out there and, with over 900 three letter combinations to choose from, a full campaign was formed.

I think this is a brilliant example of why it’s important to go to the place you’re designing for, just one simple observation has formed a brilliantly witty and direct series of adverts:

 

Finished with a neat tagline in a passport stamp style I think this campaign is pretty much faultless.

More in the range can be found here.

 

Urban Honey – Packaging Design

I thought it was about time I updated you on what I’ve been up to this term! We’ve had two projects, one live brief and one competition brief which is the one I’m going to focus on today.

The brief I chose for my competition was the jkr Juice brief to brand and package a Global Urban Beekeeper’s Company. We had to consider what products would be in the range and begin to look at ways the products could be marketed. It was aimed at 21-35 year old men and women and would be a quality brand, as they would be paying more for the benefits of city honey.

I decided not to over-complicate my brand, the product already had a number of benefits from being a natural energy boost, to each city having a distinct flavour, to a wide range of medicinal properties so I decided the strongest thing to do would be to simply combine the idea of city/urban with honey!

The brand name of Urban Honey seemed the most appropriate, and it seems to be unregistered, so used that and focused more on creating an impactful visual for the packaging which could become synonymous with the brand.

My final identity was based around road markings from various cities. By replacing the orange / yellow lines with the honey it very simply created a graphic that combined urban with honey and would stand out on shelf.

Below are the final boards I sent to jkr, you can click for a larger image and read more about my concept:

I really enjoyed the brief and I’m pleased with the final result. I think they are striking bottles that work as a range but also individually.

Let me know what you think!

A Token Blog Post

I recently came across a lovely bit of identity work by Designers Anonymous for The Tokenhouse. Their brief was to create a visual identity and promotional materials for a new pub in London, and their whole idea centres around the roots of the name ‘The Tokenhouse’ as it comes from an old city building which distributed farthing pieces.

Designers Anonymous translated this fact into a versatile logo based on a coin, with a centre illustration of a beer hop to neatly tie in The Tokenhouse’s main purpose.

They also created a straight version of the logo to allow for a variety of applications:

Which features the thing that really drew me to this identity which is the addition of a coin from the side view to act as an underline for the ‘The’:

I love details and additions like this that just make you smile when the connection clicks.

Seeing the logos in application really brings the brand to life, with a nice spinning coin for the pub sign:And the straight logo across the building:

They then played with the brand name to create a launch night invite:

And ensured the execution gave the pub some elegance and a high-quality feel:

Another part of the campaign I really like is the use of the logo in promotional materials, in particular the postcard that shows its location as ‘near bank’ and plays on this money –> bank  connection:

Whilst I was browsing the Designers Anonymous website for this post I came across this neat little detail they did for their ‘About Me’ section:

Isn’t that nice!?

All information & images for this post came from the Designers Anonymous website. 

Car adverts – are we set on repeat?

I recently came across this advert on Hello You Creatives for Fiat, it was a student project and I thought it was quite a nice idea. Whilst it doesn’t particularly highlight any of the car’s features I think it would engage with the right target market who are just after a nice looking, easy to use car.

Though on doing a bit more research into it I came across this advert by Crispin Porter & Bogusky for VW Beetle:

Which shows to me just how much difference the execution of an idea can make. It also shows that a bit more confidence and pushing the idea as far as it can go is really what sets apart student work from industry.

It’s interesting that the student work has received a lot of criticism for ‘copying’ this advert when, if you look further through the archives there’s a whole heap of adverts that focus on the personality of a car from it’s headlights:

The original? From DDB for VW in 1999

Cundari for BMW in 2005

TBWA for Nissan in 2005

BBDO for Hankook also in 2005

All found on Joe La Pompe

Although before I began writing this I wouldn’t have been aware of any. Are we a bit quick to jump to this conclusion that everyone is copying each other? Is it that all of the good, simple ideas have been done already, are we all just dull and unoriginal nowadays or are people just looking for ways to criticise and put down new work by drawing tenuous links to the past?

If you’re interested in this idea of where trends emerge from I looked at a similar thing going on in logo design in this post.

 

 

 

 

 

A Smattering of Brilliant Packaging Copy

Recently I’ve been working on a project that needed me to think of as many ways to say ‘pouring honey’ as possible! This reminded me of some brilliant work from Lewis Moberly which was done before this blog was started so never got to feature. I’m thinking about doing a few more posts like this and less just about recent work to make sure this blog is full of stuff that actually inspires me and not just the top link on creative review!

LM’s task was to create a range for Waitrose Cooks’ ingredients and they decided to focus on the language used by chefs and tap into the colloquialisms of cooking.

I think this is a brilliant way to engage with the audience and bring some personality and warmth to the brand. By keeping the rest of the packaging simple it really pushes the copy and keeps the range looking clean and up-market.

By generally keeping the same “A ____ of _____” format and neat rectangles of typography, Lewis Moberly have ensured that all of the products clearly belong to the range no matter what bottle or packet the label is applied to. It also allows them to change the background colour of the labels to add some interest and complement the product they are placed on. Having said that I like the fact they’re not afraid to break that format and have fun with some of the copy such as “Easy on the Dijon smooth mustard” which brings even more humility and likability to the range.