Logo development for Blended Teas

I created a logo for the tea brand, and this time tried to not have tons and tons of ideas as I am wont to do.  I chose this idea from a sketch I made weeks ago and made a few dud versions before I hit on one I was happier with.  The teardrop shapes are similar to those on the package design, which lends a little bit of visual consistency overall.

The B was nice and intricate but I felt it got lost in the pattern so I made it black.  Here there is a grey overlay on the lettering; I later undid this as it added that little bit too much to the packaging cover!

On the packaging:

Tried without a "Blended Teas" text, which I didn't think would work with a fictional brand as these kinds of things are usually built on a brand presence which is already known and understood.

Logo on the box cover and on the label, below.

Blended Teas packaging

Current final versions of the three product packages for Blended Teas, a fictional tea brand I created as part of an exercise in brand visuals and illustration.

Strawberry Blend flavour

As can be seen I ended up combining the fruit pattern with the teardrops underneath at a lower opacity. This happened by accident when I had one layer turned off so I could experiment with the other, and accidentally turned one of them on.  I wanted the illustrations box to look "busy", so put boxes around the text so it could be legible.  The blue colour was kept throughout the iteration process as I found it worked well with the colour schemes of each fruit - a pinker colour was tried out but I found that this meant the illustration didn't stand out as well.  

Since I used the type Marketing Script for the logo and the name of each flavour, I felt it would be suitable to select keywords in the bodies of text and highlight them in the same typeface.  This serves a dual purpose of having visual consistency and an element of persuasion by highlighting the buzzwords in the product description which make the tea sound super beneficial.

Sweet Lemon Tea 

Blueberry Brew

While I think I will go back and iterate this project some more after a break, it allowed me to get started on working with styles of familiarisation in the branding context which I have for some time wanted to base my honours project on.  I definitely have quite a lot to learn still and I expect I will try a similar project with a different style and subject matter to more overtly test the different kinds of visual persuasion and how they can affect an audience.

Vintage collages as mood boards

I was feeling a bit stuck at one point as to what kind of visuals could feasibly work in an attempt at "familiarisation", so decided to do what I always do when stuck which is…create some mood boards!  The first one shown below is one I created back in third year which could end up being useful here, and the one below in Figure 2 is made up of images from packaging and advertisements of brands which use older -looking visuals to their advantage in branding - mainly Benefit and Soap & Glory as they fit a similar market to what my current project is aimed at.  I notice that the women all look happy, glossy and good looking, and as you can see from previous posts I have borrowed that idea some in the facial expressions I have drawn and the way I have positioned the faces.  

Fig 1

Fig 2

After this research I decided to have a better look at some proper vintage/antique images, which I could mash up with food images in the hope of creating some mood boards.  After finding a collection of vintage images on the Public Domain Archive, I cut the women out and combined them with some old packaging illustrations to make several collages in Photoshop (below).  I did not create the original images, however they were available in the public domain and I used them here to create these.

Making these did not lead to any breakthrough that I can see as the process was a bit back-to-front, but it is very possible that these will feed into some later work where I take a similar approach.  

(Note:  I do not own any of the images in Figure 1 and 2, nor did I create them.  These images were collected for research purposes.)

First packaging iterations

So I posted on Thursday that I hoped to have finalised packaging up the day after - not so!  Like everything else, I do many iterations before I hit on something I feel I can take forward.  This post will show a few of them, and when looking at the final design it should hopefully show how all the ideas here fed into it.  

I began with a packaging layout and started on the strawberry girl.  I thought about only using the illustration on the front face of the packaging here, which was later decided against as tea is a food product where people need to know what flavour or ingredients they are getting.  Had I chosen to do a different kind of illustration which centred around food, this might have worked, but that is not the case so labelling had to be added after the stage shown in Figure 1.  I had considered taking influences from traditional vintage tea packaging, but at this point I found it faster to design it to fit with usual contemporary tea package designs as it would be more helpful to my practice.

A description of the product, how to  brew the tea and nutritional information were all added after looking at tea packaging in my flat.

Fig 1

I wanted to offset the main illustration with something a little more organic, which "popped" visually against the more detailed vectors.  The drops suggested liquid and the pink colour hinted at the sweet flavour of the (fictional) tea.

Fig 2

An iteration of the style above was Figure 3, where the teardrops were positioned to offset the frame I put in to centre the illustration of the girl.  The font I used was Neutron, but I knew after laying it all out that I wanted something a little punchier.    This was later switched to American Typewriter, which I used in Figure 4 and found to be a good combination of legible, pastiche and fitting with the layout.  I had other fonts in mind to use which would have offset the style of the vectors nicely, but these were an alphabet of full capitals which is hard-going on the eyes, and therefore not suitable for packaging where information is important.

Fig 3

In the for iterations for the lemon tea packaging, I tried out a fruit pattern to see if a kitsch aesthetic would work for this.    It was a little more static than I had been hoping for the packaging to be - I had hoped the visuals would look a little more dynamic, however the fruit pattern made it clear what the ingredients would be which I thought was important at this point.

Fig 4

Fig 5

 These stages were important to show as it is the experimentation which led to the final packaging visuals, which will be posted very soon!

WIP illustrations - Blended Teas

WIP vector images for the Blended Teas packaging and brand visuals.  Created in Illustrator.  These are digital interpretations of the collages I made, which can be seen in a previous post.  I hope to have these images finished and put in a packaging mock up tomorrow.

Misleading fruit posters WIPs part 2 - lemons

The lemon posters were the first of the collection of ideas, so there are a couple more style experiments in here that weren't carried over to other subject matters.  This first picture was how I had envisioned the work to be like, pre-iteration.  I like a lot of sweet little illustrations and I borrowed the style to make turn it into a warning about lemons' effect on digestion, by personifying the subject matter so that the message was cautionary rather than a screaming warning.  However after asking a few people I found that neither the illustration nor the typeface was strong enough or had an effect on people.  The image in Figure 2 had a similar reception - I used a posterize effect to mimic a screen printed look, but combined with the wispy text and background of a similar colour, it didn't really "pop" and the message was weak.

Figure 1

Figure 2

I have previously said that the colour halftone effect didn't work out so great for me, but this piece below was, to me, an exception.   Because I left textures out of the rest of the composition, the halftone is a more detailed focal point.  The curvy triangles could be made smaller, as looking at it now they are a little bulky and distracting - they were meant to suggest the corrosive element of citric acid in lemon juice as the shape is borrowed from the corrosion drops in chemical warning signs.   The composition of the backdrop was decided on after looking at other pop art posters and seeing how they were laid out.   I think this could be worked on to make it more dynamic, as at the moment it is very static and doesn't really fit with the way the lemon is positioned.   Overall though I am quite pleased at how my first attempt at a "contemporary" pop art poster turned out.

Figure 3

Looking at traditional pop art led me to discover the WPAP style, which I wasn't so familiar with but had seen in some propagandic work along the way too.  It is an extension of pop art which takes influences from cubism and similar art styles.  I am happy with the way this version of the lemon turned out so I might use this style again.  My only worry is that the style is a very "busy" one, especially the background, so I will have to see if any additional text can be worked with.  I am guilty of over-stuffing my posters with too much information sometimes too so I will have to take extra care!  I do really like the layered look of the fruit, so it is possible that I could keep this and keep the background blank.

Figure 4

Lastly I tried out the painterly-imitation technique which had worked out for me previously, and I think the results are my favourites out of this bunch.  The typeface used was one which fit well with the vintage looking visuals and was legible as well, which given that these would be read in passing in public is an important factor in the design.  

Figure 5

The smoother gradient styles worked well on the lemon shape as it is curved and could be rendered well.  I used layer masks of textured paper, which was from a freebie pack I downloaded from deviant art a couple of years ago and unfortunately can't trace it now.  The text used in the first poster very much pushed the negative aspect of citric acid content in lemons, whereas the second image uses a lot more visual rhetoric and relies on the viewer to decide whether or not the acid content is bad or good.

The textures added a bit of depth to the posters, making them look that little bit more authentic given the style I was mimicking.  This is by far one of my favourite styles I have worked in and I expect I will continue using it, but I would also hope to try out a more blocky vector style as done in the previous post (apples posters) and gauge how effective that would be. 

Figure 6

Misleading fruit posters WIPs - apples and bananas

These WIPs are for the fictional health campaign (under the working title "Choose Your Fruit Wisely" until I can come up with something better).  Overall the campaign covers apples, bananas, limes and lemons, but since there are a lot of images they are getting broken up into a few posts.  As a reminder, I aimed to take minor nutritional negatives found in fruit and amp them up to look like a health hazard, in a way not un-similar to the Ministry of Sugar Information posters I wrote about last month.  

Figure 1

Figure 1 was one of a few initial style tests I had done but was not really happy with.  I had wanted to go for a pop-art-y, Roy Lichtenstein kind of look, as my research work had recently led me to looking at familiarisation techniques in art, one of which that style is.  But the halftone tool in Illustrator can be tricky if you are a bit of a novice like me, and can come out a bit harsh on the eyes.   I decided that that style might have to stay in the experiment stage.

Figure 2

Through researching other propaganda/persuasive art, I saw that one of the most recognisable styles was a painterly one, used by artists such as Norman Rockwell and more recently Bruce Emmet.  I had a go at replicating it in Illustrator (Figure 2) and was quite surprised by the result. The use of gradients makes the colouring look smoother and semi-realistic, but the fact that is is evidently vector art keeps it contemporary.  I find the mix is quite curious but I am happy that I have managed to create something which can be identified as contemporary but borrowing from old styles.  

Figure 3

 So far the typography has been a bit hit and miss.  I really like the font used in Figures 2 and 3, as fruit is usually quite an innocent symbol in today's culture, and the typeface is quite grungy and gritty which hints that this is not the case in the artworks.   Looking at it now I see that I would need to do some altering of the compositions if I were to keep this font, as it is very blocky so takes away from the images of the fruit a little.

The font in Figure 4 was a freebie from Antonio Rodriguez, an artist who I follow on Behance.  He created a set of display fonts which bridged the gap between a vintage vibe and contemporary design - perfect to fit the illustration style here.  I do love this typeface as it looks like a classic vintage font, but I'm not sure it woks so well in this composition, so again I will go back and reiterate or try another one.  Now I look at it the background colour could be changed too.

Figure 4 - The apple took forever!

Figure 5 was created using a reference image, which was chosen because I wanted at least one of the posters to be aimed at parents of young children and faces are much more likely to be a visual anchor than a piece of fruit is.  The vector style here borrowed a little from pop art and graphic artists like Shepard Fairey, created with pen tool shapes and expanded black outlines.  Again I think I need to sort the gradient background and maybe shift the size of the boy, but I want the poster to be a little bit understated so that the audience can draw the intended conclusion from it without to being pushed on them in text on the poster.  To do this, I used the text at the top to introduce the idea and drew the chemical symbol for toxicity into the flesh of the apple to prompt the viewer to conclude the message.

Figure 5

I have started creating the same poster using gradients, and tried out a sunbeam backdrop as it is a motif commonly used in a lot of propagandic art, most recently the Luo Brothers, and once again Shepard Fairey.  I think the typeface in this poster works well with the backdrop as it is reminiscent of war posters and can be read from a distance.  The slogan "Some Poisons Are Hidden" was, like the previous poster, used to introduce the idea of apples being toxic.

Figure 6

Procrastintion-turned-coursework

  While creating the "misleading" posters as part of the pre-production module, I got a bit bored and ended up creating a couple of posters just for fun in Illustrator.  The theme of fruit was the same for the first poster, with the slogan "Drop Acid", which led to the second idea of "Get High" with sugary sweets.   Making something a little more tongue in cheek ended up as some work which I was actually quite happy with.  The posters could be taken either way, as a pun or as a warning to the (mild) dangers of eating too much acidy fruit or sugary sweets.   Of course I'm not going to compare either of the posters' contents to drugs, however it is widely known that sugar has been found by scientists to trigger the same response on an MRI scan that cocaine would, and is an addiction for many people because of this.  The "Get High" poster was a visual play on this particular fact.  "Drop Acid" is a little more abstract as it started out as something I made for my own entertainment.

The work I have done here has got me thinking about habits of consumption people have and how I could play on this is subsequent honours project development.  Much of my reading on brand identities and advertising has been based around consumer persuasion, or consumer preferences, all with the end goal of making people buy more, or eat more, or use more.  Post hand-ins I expect my work will start looking at ways in which this could be encouraged, or dissuaded.  The idea of the seven sins is being floated, as in today's society a lot of the sins are actually pushed and encouraged (gluttony, greed, jealousy in particular).   This theme is something that has been done to death, so if I am going to go down that route, the artwork will have to be presented in a way that conceals the true theme.  Initial thoughts are for a brand identity that promotes a habit, or conversely one that encourages the opposite.  If the message is presented in a way that people are already conditioned to believe or "give in to", then there is a wider scope to play around with this and not create something cliche d.

Upcoming stuff - Blended teas

This is a short blog post to talk about some work that is in the pipeline, so that when I post developments it hasn't just come out of nowhere.  In addition to the 'anti-fruit' media tests I have in the works, I am also continuing with a project I made tentative first steps in a few weeks ago.  At the time I was doing it for the sake of re-branding a poorly designed existing logo, but after researching familiarisation and nostalgic art styles used in persuasive visuals (see previous blog posts) I have realised I could apply the same approach here.  It's a little bit of a stretch to bridge the two, but I am confident there will be some kind of development in ideas and art style from it.  

The original logo was found on one of those logo-generator sites; it was a logotype saying "Blended" and was a classic bit of WordArt.  After putting a little bit of thought into what kind of company would have a name like "Blended", I settled on a tea company, aimed at women, which made tea blends that were novel in flavouring and also had vitamins infused into the blend.  As I was doing the mind map an idea started forming, so I did something a little different and cut and paste images into my sketchbook (Figure 2).  

All of the images were taken from my copies of Glamour magazine.  I chose images of women which evoked a nostalgic, fun vintage vibe like the ones seen in brand identity visuals by Benefit and Soap and Glory, and created the fruit and flowers by cutting out blocks of colour into shapes.    This ended up being quite fitting with subsequent research on familiarisation techniques - even though screen printing or some other traditional technique has not been used yet, the images have connotations of a carefree and healthy woman.  These could be developed further into a style that pushed the familiarised angle, and potentially the same brand idea could be contrasted to this with a second identity which takes an entirely different approach. 

The next stage of this particular project is in progress, with the aim being to have a collection of visuals ready for submission in 2 weeks time along with other pre-production work.  I hope to get going with it once I have wrapped up my current mini-project.

Printmaking workshop at the DCA

I have been a bit quiet on here since last week as I have been working to finish my proposal, so since which is handed in now I have time to write about a class I attended last Saturday at the DCA studio.  The workshop was called "Andy Warhol Workshop" and was essentially a crash-course in screen printing.  I decided to attend as a lot of the work I have been writing about on this blog was created by screen printing - Shepard Fairey, Shigeo Fukuda and many others have used this method in their work. Going along to the class allowed me to try a new technique and conveniently make some media tests for the pre-production module.

To start the process, the class leader Claire took our images we had brought in and scanned them so that we could tape them under the printer press as a reference.  Mine was this one (below, post-paint stains) which I took from a Toni & Guy ad (intense proposal research and extra-curricular responsibilities meant I didn't have adequate time to prepare my own image).

Fig.1 Original scan

Using these images, we then painted out on the screen press the areas we wanted to stay white, in order to block in the background colour.  The paint we used had a name I cannot remember, but it essentially blocked any paint from getting through onto the paper.  After we were satisfied with what we had painted in, we used cellophane to do a test print, and used masking tape to mark the position on the paper we wanted to print.  Below was my first "layer", drying on the rack.

Fig. 2 First layer of print

We continued this process, blocking in each layer we wanted to keep the previous colour (e.g the face was blocked out in order to keep it pink when the yellow layer was applied in Figure 3).   The layers eventually built up to the image on the screen in Figure 4.

Fig. 3 Second layer of yellow.  I kept this one as is.

Fig. 4 Blocked out layers on the nylon screen.

In the meantime, in between helping us, Claire had taken our original images and exposed them to a UV light to bring out the negative image.  These were used to add the final black layer to the images, which was printed on last and really brought the image together.  I wasn't able to get a photo of my own image so another guy kindly let me take a photo of his.

Fig. 5 Nkem's black layer print on cellophane

Fig. 6 Prints by others drying on the rack

Due to some rookie errors, my images came out a little bit misaligned in some places, but the end effect was a very retro-grunge one which surprised me.  I had ideally wanted something quite neat, but everyone agreed my mishaps had produced work that had a nice bit of dynamism to it.

  In my digital work I have been playing around with recreating printing aesthetics from Warhol's era, as Illustrator allows for the creation of halftones and stereoscopics in digital format.  I thought the results here were a nice, if accidental, little nod to that.   In addition to that, the screen prints related to a lot of my research for my proposal on a device of visual persuasion called "familiarisation".  Familiarisation is used to great effect by Shepard Fairey, Bruce Emmet and Charles S. Anderson, among others.  It is centred around recreating techniques and visual styles in their work, such as screen printing, which deliberately references work from artists in eras such as the 1960s (notably Robert Raushcenberg and Warhol, whom this class was based on) which we know as a culture to be associated with political action.  I was really interested in this idea as it could potentially play a big part in answering my research question for my dissertation.  The prints created in this workshop can at least be a starting point in this area.

 Below:  some of my end prints.

Fig. 7 This one came out wonky but I quite like the effect

Fig. 8  Not entirely sure how the yellow managed to line up so badly, but it gives the picture more depth!

Fig. 9 Image with all layers, blue background.  

Fig. 10 Print with all layers, purple background.

Creating work physically was something I realised I had missed so I hope to try this again.  I'm not sure if I will have time before deadlines so I'm pleased that I at least got to experiment with the screen printing techniques.  I hope to try creating holographs next too.