The main idea

Here I will start to design my poster through Adobe Illustrator. I will be working on an A4 art-board and will be bringing in elements that I have been working on in the past few days.

To start off I wanted to illustrate a piece similar to what I found while looking for inspiration and below is what I had come up with.

I designed this to look as if you were investing into the creative mind of an individual with autism. I really liked this piece and I liked the simple style of it and I am now going to go on to adding more elements, including the title piece.

Below I have added the logo and some text to inform the audience alongside the title of the campaign. Now from here I feel that the coin illustration doesn’t actually fit the piece as much as I wanted it to. Also the piece of text below looks awful at the moment especially in that colour so I will be putting this aside as well as the coin illustration.

Now looking at the inspiration below I felt the need to include the element that would direct the audience on what to do in order to donate.

From the inspiration, I took elements from my logo and mixed it together to create something more striking towards the audience. I made two different versions of the “label” as I’d call it. Below are the two experimentations.

I applied a drop shadow to these pieces to push it out upon the other elements as this was a key part of the poster because it was the call to action from the brief.

Now I decided that the colourful label was a little too strong and I felt it conflicted with the importance of the other elements too much so I had to dim it down a little. I thought it would be a good idea to mask the colours to the campaign title because then it would link to the style of the brand but still stay subtle in a way.

After placing this on the poster this is what I have got so far. I feel that there is still a lot of work to do but I’m not sure what that is. I also want to try and bring in the other elements but I will need to come back to this after a break.

I also put a slight drop shadow on the TISM to push that out as well to show importance of the part of the word. I will be having a short break from this and will come back to it with a few ideas on what to improve on the piece. I will seek feedback and take advice from people. To conclude, I feel as if I am on the right track though I feel that I have hit a brick wall at the moment.

Experimentation on the Creatism concept

Here I will be discussing my decisions with the typography within the Creatism campaign.

Now I did some thinking behind this idea and the thought behind the concept below was to hide in a way the CREA for the audience to concentrate on  the TISM. I did this this because it linked to the name of the organisation and it was the part of the word that was taken from the word “Autism”. The colours well represents the learning difficulty and shows creativity in some people who have Autism.

 

With the CREA part of the word, I still wanted it to be seen by the audience so I put a gradient on this piece of text just to slightly be shown to the audience so that when they paid more attention to the poster they’d then be revealed to that bit of text. I feel that if this was to get printed on big posters then I’d get this part of the text also spot UV’d as it would then boost the idea of revealing the whole word because it would catch the eye.

I experimented with a cut through the text but it didn’t have any meaning behind it other than looking cool… So I scrapped the idea but I will remember how to do so in future projects maybe to do with sports.

I will now go into creating the poster itself bringing in elements from inspiration and from experimentation. I will work on an A4 art-board at first as I usually do this when working on posters and infographics.

Thinking outside the box

Here I’d like to talk about an idea I had while I was doing some research into Autism. I was keen on the point that individuals with Autism think outside the box which is unique and is a creative trait.

The visual idea I had for this idea was what I am going to show below.

The picture shows a small description of why I wanted to go for the idea. I’d use the colours from inside the window in the logo to represent the creative mind of the individual blowing out of the logo to show that they think outside of the box. I really liked this idea and felt that it could potentially work in a way. I went on to merging it with the Creatism idea. Below is some inspiration I looked at and below that is my take on it.

 

I only got half way through this because I didn’t actually see it going any further because it just didn’t look right alongside the other element. I thought as well it looked too similar to the inspiration and thought it didn’t really match the brief.

In conclusion to this experimentation I will be dropping it due to the fact that I feel that the shape coming out of the logo is too sharp on the edges and the whole concept really didn’t have a backbone to it. I feel that the logo I have already is fine for portraying that trait of Autism anyhow because of the meanings behind each element. I also thought that the poster would become way too jumbled after it was completed and this would cause confusion to the audience. I have realised that I hadn’t explained how and why I did the effect to the Creatism text and will discuss upon this in my next blog post.

Collaboration idea for the Campaign

As I mentioned before in a previous post, I was really keen on the idea of having some sort of collaboration with a well known company. Here I will be bringing up a few suggestions and will discuss upon the idea, thus concluding the post with a decision of the use on this idea.

The idea I had was to bring in a big corporate brand, like Nintendo and Sega to relate to the case studies that they both were huge fans of both franchises. In this collaboration I would look into bringing in characters from each franchise to resemble someone with Autism. This would show uniqueness and creativity within their personalities, also linking to the point that people with Autism are late developers but a lot of people like these big characters.

The characters would either represent Autism or in fact stand up for Autism. I’d use them to portray some kind of message to inform the audience and push people to donate. The idea I feel would reach out to a big audience but from telling others about this idea it may reach out to a specific audience which is something to consider when I’m drawing to a conclusion.

The style of these posters would be clean and easy to read with simple illustrations for the well known cartoon characters. I feel that this would be good because people in their 30’s – 40’s would be like “Oh I know that character from my childhood!” and that would draw attention to the pieces. Saying this, the audience may be confused as to what the posters are about because they may feel that it would only be relating to gaming. This is another bad point to consider at the end of this post. Below is the style that I would illustrate the characters.

Putting the illustration ideas aside for a moment, I wanted to see how the logos would work together and I also wanted to see what the logo would look like on a few material mock ups. Below is my experimentation.

With the material mock ups I thought it would be an idea to link the creativity with coffee so I picked a well known coffee brand and decided to merge the two brands together just for some experimentation. This would be a good idea to do so in the real world to get ideas really flowing. Below is the merging of the two brands.

To conclude this experimentation I feel that the idea is great but it does lack the efforts to really push out to a bigger audience. These ideas would work fantastically once the business is up and running, once they’ve actually built the development centre. This would be a good campaign to reveal the project to creative studios to let them know that they could hire some potential talent once the students have finished their courses at the centre.

This process has been fun, seeing how the logo works with product material and how well the elements collaborates with other logos in subtle ways. I will keep this process in mind in the real world for sure!

2nd Process with the logo

Here I will be experimenting with colours, layouts and type for the preferred logo that was chosen by others and myself. I will be looking at different colour palettes to critically experiment for a unique outcome. Below is my experimentation. I wanted to use circles overlapping instead of any other shape because it doesn’t look too harsh with the likes of sharp edges and I felt that if it were to be squares it would clash with the outer shell of the logo being the two windows (that are square). The circles overlapping were to signify the idea of creativity itself and the uniqueness in one’s mind, relating to thinking outside the box.

I experimented with a few colour ways and found the most approachable colourways were the lighter palettes because the dark ones came out too strong and clashed with the other elements within the logo.

I then went onto experimenting with fills of the two windows and the stroke weight of the windows. I also looked at how I could push out the puzzle piece a bit more because the element is key and is used in other organisation logos. I kept this in mind to emphasis so people could recognise what the logo is about.

Based on feedback I went for the option of having no fill in the windows as it makes the logo look a little too complicated. I also went for the option of having the windows joining to take up a big portion of the logo itself. I stayed clear from the thin strokes because this logo would be getting printed in small print that would lead towards the thin stroke not being visible.

The colour palette I’m more interested in is the pale orange, teal, light blue and pink palette. This is because it is not too harsh and its more pastel like so it doesn’t distract people from the rest of the logo. I also felt the colours represent all ages too, not pinning the idea of the organisation to just one age group.

Next is looking into typefaces to match the logo. The fonts that I had already chose were a little too off and I had mixed thoughts from my feedback so I will now be looking into using the font bebas. I’m going to be using bebas because it is an easy font to match with a lot of other typefaces, it is also very strong and bold which I think is great as I will be creating a campaign for this organisation. Bebas looks strong for people who want to make a statement or change. I feel that this matches the logo well and below I will show some experimentation that I had done with the font alongside the logo.

Above you can see experimentation with alignment of the elements including a tagline. I experimented with the name by trying to mask the colour palette within the letters which I thought looked really effective though thinking about it it could clash with elements of the campaign so I may make 2 versions of the logo or stick to the one that has the name in black.

I didn’t like the looks of the lower caps font as I found it didn’t really work well with the other parts of the logo. I liked the way it looked innocent but felt that the name should be loud, as I said before bebas is a good font to use to make a statement.

Next I will be showing my final version of the logo alongside some feedback that I took for final opinions on my actions. It will also be very handy to get a few final opinions on the logo to see how I have progressed.

Further development on the logo

Here I will be developing my logo a little further drawing back to sketch book concepts for a more traditional part of process. Going back to this design process came in handy to quickly sketch up new ideas for my logo at ease even though I’m not too good at drawing.

Here is what I came up with more leaning towards a window like concept. I tried mixing in the jigsaw element into the piece but realised that it became too much almost.

From here I went to the computer to bring these sketches to life. Here is the result added to the current concepts.

Now after creating these other concepts I feel very happy with the concept of the ones below.

The idea behind this concept was to have one of the squares (windows) represent an individual with autism and the other window is representing the organisation. Once the two windows meet they reveal a colourful open space that opens up the potential creativity within ones mind. I looked at including the jigsaw piece within the colours to boost the vision of the brand being about autism.

This concept is not final and I will experiment with colours and fonts to match the illustration of the logo. I will also be getting feedback on all the other concepts just to get some outside opinions to guide me to what one I should use.

 

First design mood board

Here I will be showing a mood board that I have put together to brainstorm some ideas from my inspiration. I will be picking a few names from my brand name mind map.

As you can see I am more leaning towards the title “autistic creativity”. I am doing this because originally I liked the idea of the unlock campaign but after asking a few people at a special needs school I decided not to go ahead with that title as it did not sound nice apparently. I took their feedback very serious as that they had more of an idea about sensitivity and such.

I really liked the concept of a lightbulb lighting up with a puzzle piece within to show that the organisation seeks out the potential of ones mind who has autism. The puzzle piece represents the person with autism and the active lightbulb shows the success of unlocking the creativity.

Here you can see that I have placed an offset on the colour fill of the icon, I did this to show the imperfection of autism to create the unique look of the logo.

I have looked into using different colour ways but my favourite colour way so far is the pink, blue, green and yellow but I will go on to further experimentation with the colours later on down the line.

There is one more idea in my designs that I really liked the look of and I found the inspiration so unique to use for this.

I loved this concept so much that I had to apply it to my title though I feel that I will not be able to use this. However I will be looking into alternative ways to portray such a unique concept.

So pretty much I am stuck now here between two designs. I will now go on to ask for some feedback and will work from that though this process will not be fulfilled till Friday so I will be looking at alternative ways around the window logo for the time being.

 

Experimentation and justification on the last bits and decisions

Here I will be explaining what I have done to achieve this final look of the menu for the charity and pub.

Throughout the menu I have looked at the spacing between each paragraph style and applied it to each section in accordance of the first page. This is to keep the style consistent and gain more of a flow. I have also made sure that all the elements of each page are aligned to the middle to stick to the design.

I have also changed the opacity of all the illustrations to about 50% to 60% just to make sure they don’t disappear off the page. My lecturer did tell me that I may want to consider using greys instead of the opacity option to stay on the safe side but I decided to flatten the document layers by exporting it to PDF. Doing it this way does the job for you and transforms the transparent elements into solid colours. During my test print it was done from an Ai file, that’s what caused the illustrations to go missing.

The text had to be amended based on some final feedback from the charity. They wanted it to be a little more shorter and only highlighting the main points being a slight description of what they do. If the viewer wants to find out more they can simply look up their website.

I decided to look critically into the placement of the illustrations now as they could clash with the text, a few pieces from the wines list did in fact clash or come too close to the text to I adjusted the placement of them.

The reason why I didn’t include the glass sizes on the gins, wines and other spirits list was simply because I didn’t want the menu to become too crowded and the viewer could easily ask the waiter what the sizes are but they may even already know because, in the pubs main drink menu it has all the sizes labeled.

Why didn’t you just use their current menu and add icons to the drinks that were on the charity list? – I wanted this to stand out a lot as it was such a great cause and I thought if it was just a little amendment to their current drinks menu it wouldn’t gain much attention. Also all the other menus are dark on their tables, this one would strongly stand out with its bright colour which is also vintage looking, keeping it classy.

I will be going onto printing this piece and doing a final blog showing the outcome and the PDF. The print will be produced on thick card paper with a matte finish to stick to the formatting of the pubs other menus.

 

 

Experimentation on the inside pt 1

Moving on to developing the inside pages I will consider my findings about laying out text and will keep in mind my knowledge on leading and font sizes.

Going back to my blog from when the pub gave me their content I will start to lay out the text as followed.

I’m going to be keeping the font the same throughout because I want to keep consistency of the pubs brand alongside the elements that run the consistency of the charity brand. This will bring balance to both brands.

Below shows how I have placed in the text. I have made the title of the drinks along with the prices bold by keeping them a dark text and with the leading being fairly large to make it easy to read. The bio of the drinks are decreased in size but only by a couple of points, still being able to be read easily. I will check this though on a test print once I have finished this experimentation session.

Here is how the leading and text size looks on the character palette for the drink bios.

Though the layout is no where near to how I want it to look I went on further to laying out the text. Below is the result.

I saw that one of the drinks on the list were in fact not suppose to be included on the list so I took it off. I made the background colour the same and chose not to put the pattern over it as that it would again clash with the content of the page. Instead I added a couple of the wine glass illustrations to the piece to add some flavour to it.

To help bring in consistency of the charity brand I chose to again, like I did on the front cover, lay the boxes aligned to each sub heading which was: White Wine, Red Wine and Rosé Wine. This was done to indicate each area of the pages. Below is the other page to the DPS that also included Gin as I had made space for it seeing as I had to still place the beer and other spirits section in on one page. Gin is also very fancy and pricey as well as wine so to keep these drinks on the same DPS I felt was necessary.

I added an illustration of a glass of gin to the gin section only where there was a bit of white space, it was hard to find a slot for it because it was too text heavy but I think I found a good place for it and didn’t feel the need to add another one because then it would get too busy.

On the Gin list you can notice some blue text, this is to highlight the section of the bio giving their audience a suggestion on what they can drink it with. I chose blue as that it represents one of the charities brand colours. I chose blue because it is a friendly colour and easily visible. Red would become too dangerous looking and Yellow was too bright against the background colour.

Conclusion to these two pages is that the style works well with the font and elements within, it will most likely need looking at again as there will be a few issues with it as I can already see there is a fair amount of lonely text laying here and there. I will revisit this DPS after implementing the style from these pages on to my last page.

Experimentation on the front cover pt 2

Here I will be experimenting with my illustrations and looking at what works well to make the front cover stand out. Originally I was thinking of just getting my illustrations in a line and laying them along the middle of the page to break up the text. Although I didn’t find this so eye catching compared to ones in my inspiration post.

Instead of that idea I thought it would be a good idea to have them laid out as a wallpaper style like so.

To give the pattern some movement I came to a conclusion to place the illustrations in columns and shift the columns. I also thought it being straight didn’t make it look natural so I rotated the whole artwork a little to the right.

Also making the pattern hang off the page was to again show natural movement. Now the pattern makes the page look too busy so I went on to dropping the opacity to about 50% maybe even less, though I will have to be careful as I don’t want to clear the pattern off the page completely. This does depend on printing.

Here’s what I have got so far, plus the subheading being in the similar style of the main heading/ title. I did this because that part of the text is just as important as the title. It is also in italic to show that it is informing.

I decided to cut the illustration pattern at the bottom before the text because it would have clashed with the text making it hard to read. Once I had done that I aligned the text in the middle of the created white space to keep it looking neat.

To bring in elements of the charity I done it in the simplest way possible. I’ve worked with the school before so I have experienced combining the brand elements into a piece of work.

I took the simple boxes used in the charity’s logo and aligned them to each section of the front cover, it’s hard to explain so here is a screenshot.

The simple boxes from the logo

The alignment

Finally I thought it was key to show the logo of the charity at the top to highlight more what the menu is all about. I did this because, the things at the top usually are the first things to notice, seeing that logo in a pub comes across different and makes the viewer curious as to what it’s about, therefore they should pick it up to read.

That’s a wrap for the time being for my front cover. Keeping it minimal and vintage yet sticking to the Step by Step brand I think it has come out very successful. Solving problems such as the possibility of the front looking too cluttered I have solved it very well. I will now move on to laying out the inside of the menu.