The Posters.

For my poster I played on the DPI theme using dots as a main feature on the poster I mixed these in with a retro style to give it a nice vintage feel. 

I went with a brown coloured background to help with achieve a retro feel to the poster and then used brighter colours for the dots to give it a nice contrast. As I went with the dots which is probably the most obvious route I wanted to do something different with the typography so I used a really cool font called Hipstelvetica. This modernised the poster and also added that something unique that I was looking for, personally I really like this font particularly on the title at the top. 

Other than this I added the social media and Brighton media centre logo's as well as my name now all thats left is to pitch this to the class along with everyone else's poster. 

Arriving late to the Party

I came into this final project a week late as I was still recovering from the illness I had before. By this time the name of the end of year show had already been discussed and decided, the final name being Dots Per Inch. The others that I know were considered were RGB (Really good Bullshit) and Synergy however these were dismissed. 

So with the name chosen a schedule/plan was also made to show who is doing what and in what kind of time scale this should be done by. With the teams already decided on I joined the social media team and also offered to help with the set-up and clear down of the actual show.

As well as this we all had to mock-up a poster for the show which could then become the branding, we had a week to do this.

Latest TV Brief

The next project is a live brief from latest tv a television channel launching later in the year, the project is too create the idents and title sequences for the channel as a whole and for the separate shows. As a class we were allocated our own project I was allocated idents for the overall channel which came with it's own brief. 

The brief comes from the channel director at latest tv David Cuff the brief lays out what they want for the project.

The main part being -

Channel Idents/Stings: Duration 1­-10 seconds. Branded Latest TV interstitials ­ still or with movement to use as break bumpers and between. Stand out stuff that say who we are. Perhaps changing with the seasons or months and/or to account for whatever is going on in the city or on the channel. Channel 4 do the 4 things ­ they brand the channel.

This encapsulates the project and explains that I need to create a series of unique idents that brands the channel and change with the months and seasons of the year. So the next step for me is to research further into different idents to gain a better understanding of them and also to research into latest tv to understand the brand more hopefully giving me ideas on how to brand the channel.

Choosing Photos

For the ad campaign I decided early on to go with stock images of woman doing activities that related to the effects of the drinks. In my sketchbook I printed out a bunch of these types of photos and created a mood board that let pick the best for actual ads. It's important that these were high quality images with  a woman as the focal point. I also kept an eye on the space as I needed to fit it tag-lines and the the bottles as well as any other styling detail. 

The two main images I went with as the 'face' for each of the drinks are the following.

Both are set in nature so they instantly give off that feel and as well as this both offer a lot of space for me to work with around the woman. 

Mock-up

For the mock-up I tried to include the initial ideas that have spoken about in my sketchbook as well as ones that I had come up with whilst experimenting on the mock-up. I tried to really give myself and other a strong idea of my concept. As I discussed in the sketchbook I used stock photography for the main background image of the woman running and then experimented with how too create a glow around her. The best results I had was drawing round her and then layering via cut gave me the body on a separate layer and then I could create the glow in a number of ways. 

Other key parts of the design is the large tag line 'supercharge your day #naturalboost' tying in with the glow effect it hopefully gives the impression that the woman is supercharged. As well as this the tagline is short and simple and the hashtag at the end keeps the brand young and social connecting to twitter.  

The cut off at the bottom of the ad is something that needs work and I still haven't quite decided how I want this too look. With the typography here also needing work, the bottle is also very rough as I havent decided on what type of bottle I want for the packaging only that it won't be the standard boost bottle as that in my opinion is too heavily associated with high caffeine/sugar drinks. 

As a mock-up I think this will be very useful during the pitch to give people a real clear idea of my concept and ideas. One point I already know of is that whilst creating it I started to move away from natural elements so that something to look at. 

Making-Up The Drinks

Part of the boost brief is too actually make up the new products by putting together different ingredients which makes a drink with lots of positive health benefits. Too help boost provide an ingredients list for you to use and show the health benefits of each one. As this was all a bit new to me I decided to get help from my brother who has done a course in nutrition as I thought I could then make some drinks that actually work. 

We decided to make two different drinks which have very different purposes and benefits as I thought this would give me a strong base for the project and from here I could go on to create the ad campaign for each. 

The first drink was a big energy boosting drink which would be perfect for someone who has a busy day, tired at work or going for a workout. The ingredients for this drink are coconut water, ginseng, dragonfruit and cranberries each of which has it's own benefits which I will show below but because this one drink is designed to give you a big energy boost I decided to go with the name 'Boost Supercharge' to give the idea of how strong the benefits of the drink are. 

The second drink we decided on was one that had an opposite effect on people instead of giving them a charge this one is designed as a detox drink which has cleansing effets and helps remove all the toxics and crap from the body. The ingredients for this drink are Green Tea, Ginger, Burdoch and Elderflower. The name I went with on this drink was 'Boost Detox' this makes the purpose and benefits of the drink clear to the customers. 

The ingredients and there benefits - 

                      

Typography

Unfortunately I have to stick to boosts branding guidelines and use there chosen fonts these being Franchise for headings and tag lines and sans bailey as body text. This is annoying as with the project being so open I think deciding on typography for my drinks could have been a big part. Possibly with the two drinks each having there own typography which would have helped each of them stand out as there own unique product. One bonus however would be that it makes it easy to keep the adverts looking consistent and part of the same campaign.

Boosts Current Campaign

Given in the project pack was boosts current ad campaign which comes from a satirical and comedic point of view, which for some may work but im personally not keen. It feels like they are trying to hard to be a young 'cool' brand and I see this as the reason they have set females as the key target audience for this project. Because this 'Boost up yourself' campaign would not have appealed to females at all in my opinion. Part of this is the whole "boostism" concept they use in the campaign, in there own words these are bravado-fuelled statements which would appeal a lot more to men then women particularly the statements they use and the photos. 

For example this advert "Boost dropkicks tired in the face" is one of their pieces in the 'boost-up yourself' campaign. Which as I mentioned uses their 'boostism' concept which sticks to the brand as in there own words they are a fun, youthful and energetic company. 

My aim is to produce a more mature campaign that does not alienate the core audience of boost and also atrracts women to the product as stated on the brief.

Pitch

Today I pitched my ideas for the boost project to the class and got some really good responses and feedback. Overall the idea of the two drinks with two distinct effects was a succes and the ideas around advertising these were generally received with good feedback, a couple of the ideas I was experimenting with were discussed and I was swayed off using these in the final product.

Points to work on -

• Makes ads appear more natural
• Lose neon theme and go for softer natural colours
• Change the speedometer as too manly 

So the pitch was really helpful and gave me a good direction with my work and also helped me finalise ideas and themes. From here I think I need to rework my mock-up trying to improve on the points listed above. 

Choosing Boost

I have decided to change my brief from LTA British Tennis to Boost I did this because after reading through them again I feel that the boost brief is a much more exciting challenge. It has a lot more freedom and lets you create your own product and basically just run with it making a whole launch campaign. This really appealed to me and it's something I thought I could really get stuck into. 

The Brief  - 

So the brief for this project is too essentially create a new water and vitamin drink for the company boost. The first step is to pick and choose the ingredients used in the drinks this can up to six different flavours from here they want a campaign that launches this product range 'bringing it to life and showing the benefits of the drink'. 

The mandatories for the project as laid out by the brief is a name for the product, packaging design as well as an art direction and a copy for the campaign. Furthermore it lists press advertising, packaging designs, point-of-sale, sampling ideas and digital assets  to be clear on what is required for the project. 

The brief also states that you can follow on from the provided ad campaign 'boost yourself up' however this is not required and it goes onto say that you should not feel restricted by this. 

The target audience given in the brief is 'health aware 16-25 year old female market' highlighting that they are not obsessed with going to the gym or a healthy lifestyle but are aware of choosing products with natural health benefits. However as well as this they do not want to alienate there core market of 16-25 year old males. 

Next Steps - 

My step steps in this project will be to look at and decide on the flavours of the drinks that I want my product range to feature. From here I can look at the health benefits of this and start coming up with the campaign for this. 

TennIS Posters

The brief came with the posters from the LTA's tennis is campaign which was mentioned in the brief under useful information. The campaign uses the is at the end of tennis to lead on to the rest of the slogan, the 'is' is highlighted through the use of a different colour. This makes it easy to understand the concept of the campaign to viewers, the messages given through the adverts change and each one has it's own target audience. 

As you can see the adverts target families, people wanting to lose weight, old people and people in high stress or demanding jobs. The posters are good and I think the main taglines are clever and the messages sent out are very positive about tennis. For my work these posters could be used depending on the idea and concept I decide on, and whilst these do show the range of who tennis can be good for I could rework the general concept to work for the target audience of women as taken from the LTA brief. 

Coffee vs Tennis

From the list of YCN briefs the two that appealed to me most were the LTA British Tennis brief and the Nescafe Azera brief. 

LTA Brief - The key part of the LTA brief is to get more women in the uk playing tennis, once you get into the actual brief the target audience is very clear and precise. The 'creative challenged' is explained and clear in that you have to create a campaign to increase awareness of the benefits of tennis to women. More precise than this they want to target women they describe as Lapsed players (i.e. they used to play a lot but not anymore) or infrequent players (i.e. they play a bit in the summer) It also lays out what it thinks will be the key barriers for the the campaign to overcome and the key motivators the campaign can use. As well as this the brief states that I could use any medium or combination of media to create the campaign. 

Nescafe Brief - The Nescafe brief is about creating a new product innovation for the Nescafe Azera range. The brief lists out the 'creative challenge' in three main points first of it explains that you have to come up with a new idea for the Azera range which can be a tweak or a revolution. The second point is that they want you to launch a social media campaign to launch the new product innovation and finally they want to know how it would stand out in-store. The target audience is described by the brief not as much detail is given as the LTA brief but it describes them in relation to coffee.

YCN Project - The Briefs

For this next project I have been given the freedom to choose my own brief from a list on the YCN website. This is for the YCN student awards which it is recommended I enter this deadline is the 27th March whilst the internal deadline is the 10th of February.  The project has a wide range of companies to choose from ranging from Dominoes to the Royal Albert Hall then each of these has a their own brief and desired outcomes. For example Dominoes want to 'reassert there ownership over tuesdays' whilst the Royal Albert Hall want to raise the awareness of their charity work. 

Looking through the briefs there not one that really stands out to me as something I must do, however there are a couple that I like the sound of. So researching these further and brainstorming ideas will hopefully give me some direction for the project. 

From here I must prepare a pitch for the 20th Jan and be ready to crit on the 5th Feb, also as part of the project I will travel to YCN in London to discuss the briefs and more. Overall I think once I have chosen a brief and have an idea that this will be a good project. 

Restricting The Game

After having some trouble designing the game graphics to a level where I was happy with them I decided to experiment and add some rules for myself. I thought if I added some boundaries for myself to stay in I would be able to design something that was more simple than my previous artwork but was also much more stronger visually.  

The rules that I decided to stick too was -

• The use of only 4 colours - Black, dark grey, light grey, green
• No backgrounds

Whilst being simple things I found it a lot easier to create my artwork following these two rules, the four colours all mix together well and with the use of strokes in the artwork I think the colour scheme is actually quite strong and each of the elements has it's own colour code. For example the users weapon and controls are all coloured in light grey with a stroke of green whilst the enemy are dark grey with a stroke of black. This broke up the different parts of the game like I mentioned but also because the colours all work well together these different elements come together and do not look disjointed or out of place. 

Using no backgrounds also gave me one less thing to worry about, in my previous attempts and the game artwork or even the game ideas I found myself thinking what sort of background I need to use and how detailed it should be. The idea of no backgrounds free'd me in a way as it meant I could draw all of the other elements in the same way without thinking about how detailed the background needed to be or what perspective it needed to be in. In the end I actually think having no background works well and is not too simple or out of place, and whilst the game may have looked better with one i'm happy with the result form sticking to the two rules I had set out. 

This method of restricting myself really helped me push on with the designing of my game which I had been stuck on for some time. It is an idea I will look to use in the future if I am in a similar situation. 

Adding More Features / Slight Change of Idea

I've decided that I need to add more features to my app as i'm not confident about designing one of the games that I have suggested in a way that fits in with the rest of the visual style on the app. This is not to say that I have completely changed my idea but I feel it is needed as designing the graphics for the game is harder than I first thought. With a few other features if the game is not strong the whole project will not be a complete disaster with other features to fall back on.

After looking through the jamesons website again a taking a closer look at the contents I decided to use the sections on recipes and how they make jamesons as the extra content on my app. I already have some idea on ways that I want to use/display the information.

Idea/Proposal

My proposal for the jamesons app is too create a game based of off their existing tall tales ad campaigns. The adverts which I have covered in an earlier post show John Jameson rescuing his whiskey from a four different predicaments, this gave me the idea to recreate these situations as addictive little games that whilst will not be over complicated will hopefully draw users in. I plan to stay true the jamesons brand and use there colour scheme and a typography similar to there which I have been through in earlier posts. 

I think this app idea will work as it keeps with the brand and builds on an already successful ad campaign, which with it's popularity amongst the jamesons customer will hopefully make the app a popular with them. 

Wireframes

Before I pitch my ideas to the class I made some very basic wireframes of how I am planning some of my app screen to look at this moment in time. I think however that these are likely to change depending on how the artwork goes once I have started to make it.

These wire frames being the general idea for most of the app I have however thought more about using nav menues at the top of the page. The white on the wireframes will be a background for the menues this will be a green gradient popular in the jamesons brand. 

Colours

For the colours I decided to stick to the brand a much a possible as it keeps the theme with the brand, this would give me a nice range of colours to use and also keep the bulk of my design in the elegant green gradients that jamesons use throughout there website/brand.

Typography

After doing some research I discovered that the main font used by jamesons whiskey is actually a font called jamesons which I was unable to find. However after looking for similar fonts and others that I thought suited the brand I have decided to use 'garabond' as the main type face for my project. It has a vintage look which is similar to the jamesons font itself, this look also gives the feel that it comes from the 1700/1800's around the time jamesons was established. 

So I very much thought that it suited the brand and as well as being able to be used on it's own the type face also looks right when used on images that feature the actual company font which is a big positive as I had plans to use the bottles and barrel as part of my artwork. 

Overall I think this font will work well for headers and short amount of text, I may however look for a less stylised/retro font for some of the text on the app particularly if it is long. I'm not sure what fonts what fonts will work for this purpose yet, but again I want to find something that I think suits the brand and does not look out of place when it all comes together. 

Chosen Brand

For my brand I decided that Jameson's whiskey was the brand that I wanted to go with, I chose jameson's over the other brands for a number of reasons. The two main reasons being that they have a unique ad campaign which is very popular amongst customers and has also won awards. The live action adverts which I have covered in another post really drew me in and I think that I could use these in my ideas for the jamesons app. 

The second big reason that I decided to go with jamesons is the history of the brand, the website talks a lot abut being a family brand and how John Jameson the founder and owner was one of the workers and had a personal connection with each of them e.g. through the use of a nickname for each worker. These types of stories and info on the website really bring out the family feel the brand wants that all the workers love working there and make the whiskey with passion, as well as this it really shows you how the brand want you to see john jameson as a unique boss who everyone liked. 

Overall I think the brand has a strong existing campaign and a history that I will be able to use to my advantage to make an app that really suits the brand.