OUGD406: Speaking From Experience

I started by mind mapping ideas:


My idea i picked for the brief was to create four posters which would highlight four of the essential items forgotten by students.

As the brief is aimed at the next first years, I thought who better to ask than the students in class. I posted a question on facebook asking what were the essentials that they forgot when coming to uni.        

I designed three boards, Concept, Production and Method of Delivery.

We had a crit on the Tuesday which was with five other students, two tutors and two third years. I clearly presented my idea and was given some brilliant feedback. After the crit I was given the idea to just focus on kitchen essentials. The posters when turned over and put together in a specific order created a bigger a2 poster which would give information on what was the most useful kitchen essentials. The posters were to be informative and also for aesthetic purposes allowing students to cover up their bare walls.

After  the crit I gathered more data based specifically on kitchen essentials:

I made a list of the items which were the most popular and added a few extras:

Knife
Drainer
Can opener
Bottle opener
Chopping board
Sponge
Scourer
Cleaning Products
Tongs
Cheese Grater
Freezer Bags
Kettle
Mugs
Frying Pan
Crockery
Oven Gloves

I started by designing thumbnails of how i wanted the posters to look along with ideas of logos. I'd looked at the design of catalogue magazines and maybe how it could influence my design, I thought it was appropriate to what i was designing.
 

Here are some logo designs:

I experimented with different logos and fonts working from my thumbnails and looked at different colours and what would work most effectively.

Originally i was set on using a font which was in the style of a marker pen. I liked the idea of it looking like it'd been written by hand, kind of like a shopping list. I wanted my posters to feature actual photos of the Kitchen essentials as I thought It corresponded with the catalogue style i was going for.

We had a second crit with bigger groups, I presented some ideas for my posters and got some helpful feedback. I was also given advice to maybe producing a booklet, as four posters wasnt enough for the time we'd been given. I decided to start on a booklet which would list all the kitchen essentials and would give a price guide for the cheapest items and where to get them. Here are the posters from the crit:

Keeping the posters minimalist enables you to focus more on the utensil which was in the poster. As from my research I realised there was a lot of items which I could design my poster on, I wasn't sure whether to have one item in the posters or several different ones.

I started work on the booklet and decided that i needed to define a logo before continuing.

I decided to go with the name 'What Uni'd', It's cheesey but it was appropriate and it worked really well.
I started by picking a font which i thought i could work with. I chose a font called Salina, I liked the style, it's not in your face and it flows nicely.

 I experimented with different fonts to see what would work better but but liked 'salina' out of all of them.

 Here is the final logo:

 During the process of creating the logos I played around with some different poster designs using illustrations instead of real images:

I started to design a final poster using the logo, I used real images as I it looked better than the illustrations, and fit with the catalogue style.

We had another crit which was in smaller groups, it was very helpful as it changed my design from having real images to illustrations. As I was going to have to take the photos myself I'd have to get studio lighting, and the essentials which I had were very cheap and it would effect the aesthetic of the posters. I agreed that designing with illustrations was the best way. Also i decided that I'd have to scrap the idea of the four posters making one big posters as I was printing on newsprint and you can't print double sided on it.

Here are the final designs for my four posters:

For the booklet I collected all the essentials which I wanted to feature and collected a price list from the three most popular stores, Wilkinson's, Argos and Morrison's.

I designed the booklet in the same style as the poster:

After getting the layout down all i had to do was add the text the image and the price range:

Below is a few pages from the final booklet. The front cover was influenced by the logo design, with the crossing knife and fork.

The posters I designed also corresponded with the booklet, so the number and colour fit to the same number and colour as the booklet, again referring to a catalogue style. I designed each item individually using illustrator.