FINAL PIECE | FMP

After 7 weeks of work, my final piece for this FMP finally took shape. I am satisfied with the final outcome, although I could have produced much more. The process of development in my sketchbook helped me a lot to define the design and a final idea. Through this whole year, using a sketchbook has been really useful. Not only to test and design but to show the story behind a final piece as well.
I am looking forward to seeing my piece during the Degree Show at Ravensbourne.

Mockup of WeareWhatWeEat subscription. Author's own.

Image of the product. Bin bags for food waste collection. Author's own.

Image of 'organic' clothing branded WeareWhatWeEat. Author's own.

Animated infographic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UgUVCiXm_Cc

Advertising poster 1. Author's own.

Advertising poster 2. Author's own.

Advertising poster 3. Author's own.

BRAND ASSETS DEVELOPMENT 3 | FMP

Printing on clothing and bin bags:

For the last part of the brand placement, I chose to print on organic fabric clothing (ideally) and the product (bin bags). Because the process of printing on fabric at Uni would have taken too long to make, I relied on a printing specialised shop. I am satisfied with the final result as it looks really well made and suitable for the Degree Show. (images below)

Brand assets on t-shirts. Author's own.

I decided to only print the whole logo on a white t-shirt and just the extracted pattern on a black one. Theoretically, these t-shirts should me made of organic fabric coming from food waste. They are not because I could not find any recycled fabric and time was quite tight. This could be a part to develop further for this project in the future.

For the print of the bin bags, I decided to adopt the same system as the posters. To realise a series of three design using catchy slogans. (images of the design below)

Other than being intriguing, the slogan is informative as well as it explains the purpose of the bag/subscription. To print the design I used the UV printer (image below) in the prototyping lab at Uni. The process did not take too long and the overall look satisfies me.

UV printer. Author's own.

COLLECTION EXHIBITION AT TATE MODERN GALLERY | FMP

On the 19th of May I went to visit the Tate Modern, in particular the Collection Exhibition which consists of work of different artists and different medias. The first thing I noticed when I went into the space was how photography, sculpture, painting, printing and video were all mixed in the same space. I think this was a good choice to display work as it is more engaging and inspiring. What I liked in particular was the use of frames for photography and prints. In fact, black and white photos were framed with black frames. To me this allowed not only the photo to match the frame, but the whole piece to stand out even more from the white painted wall. Another example of the use of frame was the one about some prints from WWII. The colour of the print was kind of sepia and so the frames were. Images below.

B&W photography. Tate Modern.

Prints matching the colour of the frames. Tate Modern.

I also found a piece of art which was part of my research for this Final Major Project. (image below)

Photographic composition, Barbara Kruger. Tate Modern.

The piece is a photographic composition, then painted on canvas. The artist Barbara Kruger made a lot of work with this style. The theme she manage is about consumerism, society and mass media.

This visit at the Tate Modern Gallery really inspired me more and helped me to be able to describe an exhibit space in more details. I have also been able to see the outside of the new wing which is opening on the 17th of June. I am currently working with other students from Foundation Degree and Graphic Design Degree as well for the Youth Opening ceremony. I am looking forward to seeing our visuals displayed on the back wall of the Turbine Hall!

BRAND ASSETS DEVELOPMENT 2 | FMP

Subscription (flyer and envelope) and product

The concept for my campaign revolves around a subscription which provides a bin bag and allows you to recycle food waste which is then collected and transformed into organic, next-gen fabric for clothes. In order to design something different and unconventional, I started making some experiments in my sketchbook. Along with this, I annotated my thoughts about what could work and what could not. 

I started experimenting with the design and the format of the envelope. 

Experiments and annotations in my sketchbook. Author's own.

I used the format for an A4 sheet folded in three and started placing the logo and other visuals like the pattern of the brand. I did another experiment with a bigger format but I did not like it as it looked way too big. The envelope will include an informative flyer resuming what the brand is about, a case for the product (bin bag) and the actual product. I found using normal white paper too conventional and corporate for the envelope so I decided to visit the material library at Uni to find other materials. 

Experiment with clear acetate on my sketchbook. Author's own.

Closed envelope made with clear acetate. Author's own.

I found this material (clear acetate film) really interesting and robust enough to hold the content. The transparency would make a nice effect with the white sheet inside and the black logo and the pattern would stand out even more. However, I had initial problems with the printer as shown in the image above. I imagine receiving a subscription with a transparent envelope as quite innovative and different. This is what drove my decision.

For the design of the folded flyer, I chose something quite simple and purely informative.

Informative flyer. Author's own.

I opted for an A4 sheet where I put the logo, the pattern of the brand, a couple of slogans and a short description of the subscription/product. In my sketchbook, I made some annotations about how this is my definitive decision and how it works for me. 

Testing materials for product

As the main part of the subscription is the bin bag, I decided to include it directly in the envelope. However, I had to research and test different materials. I went back to the material library at Uni but I did not find anything looking like a bin bag.

Clear plastic film at the material library at Ravensbourne. Author's own.

This (image above) is the unique material I found which I could potentially use for the product. However, what I was looking for was something not that clear but more matte or opaque.

I decided to go to a supermarket and see what kind of bin bags the had and I got some samples. 

Testing materials for the bin bag. Author's own.

I focused on two different materials (bags) in particular (image above). As I annotated in my sketchbook, the black bag was discarded straight away because I could not print on it and it reminded me of a conventional bin bag too much. And it was really smelly as well. Therefore, I decided to stick with the matte white one (left-hand page). At uni, we have machines able to print on that material and I experimented printing the pattern on the clear bag. After a first failure, I managed to have the pattern well designed on the bag. It just looked a bit empty. So, I decided to include different phrases in order to have different bags to deliver (images below).

   

BRAND ASSETS DEVELOPMENT | FMP

In order to be able to visualise the brand in a more broad way, I decided to produce different brand assets. Including poster(s), flyers, infographics and product I had to start planning what I was going to design. After visiting the Museum of Brands, I have been highly influenced by a campaign by the brand of Scotch Whisky Johnnie Walker. However, I thought the visit at that space was not going to help me for my FMP, that series of posters really inspired me for the design of mines.

Advertising poster(s) development:

I started making further research about Johnnie Walkers as a brand and its advertisement. 

Johnnie Walker's advertising campaigns. 

What I really liked, and helped my project is the interaction between the series of posters in the image above in the page on the left-hand side. The design is mainly focused on the message leaving the rest of the format clean with just the logo and the product. This solution suggests how the posters are meant to be in a series and to belong to the same campaign either. From this research, I decided to adopt the same concept in the posters for my 'product'. I started doing some experiments with formats, type and placement.

Poster design development. Author's own.

In my sketchbook I made several experiments with annotations on how the format, type and visual could work or not. I decided to design a series of 3 posters having the same format and placement of type and logo. With this solution, the body copy would have taken the scene in the poster. In order to advertise the product, the subscription, food recycling and the making of organic fabric, I decided to think about a catchy and playful slogan. In my opinion, a strong and attractive phrase could engage more than seeing an image of the product, the subscription with the bin bag in my case.

Testing slogans for posters. Author's own.

After making some annotations and a list of related topics in my sketchbook I came up with these 3 ideas:
1. Out of date food? Bin it! We will collect it and give it a new life.
2. Sad because you throw too much food away? Stop crying! You can help us reusing your waste for       beautiful things.
3. Tryna freshen up your wardrobe? Why not wear your rubbish?! We transform food waste into organic and ready to wear clothes.
What makes these slogans catchy to me, is the way each of them contains a problem, a solution and the explanation of the solution. For example: "Out of date food?" This first part propose a problem, "Bin it!" Here the solution to the problem is found, "We will collect it and give it a new life." an explanation of the process and the subscription is given in this last part of the body copy.

After deciding the content for the body copy, I started thinking about layout, colours and logo placement.

Poster design and experiment. Author's own.

I initially found myself quite undecided between the design with a white background and the one with a black background. The first one would have been much easier and cheaper to print but the second one (black background) was my choice ad it looked much more finished and let the message stands out much more as well. I Choose Helvetica Regular as typeface because it has been recognised as almost universal and to me is clearly legible and quite modern looking as well. I have also seen the documentary Helvetica for the second time in order to get more knowledge and inspiration. Blogpost regarding Helvetica documentary: http://nicoloellerdesign.blogspot.co.uk/2016/03/helvetica-documentary.html

Here (images below) is the final series of 3 posters for my campaign.

Poster 1. Food recycling. Author's own.

Poster 2. Reusing food waste for fabric. Author's own.

Poster 3. Promotion of organic clothes made of your food waste. Author's own.

I am happy with the final results as the design is simple but eye-catching. The message stands out well and it is engaging for the viewers.
👍 

On the 22nd of May, while travelling on the Underground to go to work, I saw another interesting piece of advertisement (image below) from the brand Old Mout Cider. They used the same system of the series of posters but those are meant to be placed one next to the other. They interact as a continuing story and I found them really clever and engaging! However, if one of them would fall, which happens quite frequently, the whole sense would be lost and the message would not be conveyed the same way. This is the reason why I decided not to use this system for my project now, but it could be something to develop in the future to push the FMP further.

Advert for Old Mout Cider. Series of posters. Hammersmith & City Underground line. Author's own.

MUSEUM OF BRANDS, PACKAGING AND ADVERTISING | FMP

Today I visited the Museum of brands, packaging and advertising in Notting Hill, London. As my Final Major Project is mainly focused on branding, I decided to visit this place to look for an inspiration and also because I never heard of it before. However their website does not look too new and intuitive, the exhibit is located in a really nice building in a fabulous area of London. 

When I got in, the first gallery was about packaging. It immediately looked a bit like a huge collection of old 'stuff' to me but some of it, especially the most recent one, brought back some memories. I could recognise products and toys I used to play with when I was young. I really enjoyed walking through that space as it was packed with any sort of toys, healthcare products, food packaging, home appliances, etc. What caught my attention was the huge difference in terms of style and design between the 50s, for example, and nowadays. Posters, adverts, logos and images, in general, were much more illustrative and drawn compared to what we see now. Today's design is much more flat, clean and in some ways less sophisticated as we tend to minimalise and modernise it.

Museum entrance. Author's own.

Advertisement posters from the 50s. Author's own.

First 'Quality Street' packaging. Author's own.

The part of the museum I preferred and got the most out of was the one about Advertising. Towards the end of the gallery, there is a small part dedicated to the history of advertising. I spent a good half an hour in the same room looking at posters, videos and other material. I felt some real interest while reading facts about the brand Johnnie Walker and its techniques of promotion. I found the design of some posters from the late 90s (image below) really interesting and intriguing.  

Johnnie Walker's campaign. 

What I found interesting is the interaction and connection between the different posters. They are meant to be a series which could potentially tell a story about the brand or the product itself. The use of colour is really eye catching as well thanks to the contrast between black and yellow. This piece could influence the design of the posters for my FMP. 

Other than this last series of posters, I did not really find anything else inspiring during my visit. Nevertheless, I highly recommend visit this museum as it is rich and a bit nostalgic. The cafe area in the back yard is an amazing and intimate corner where to share ideas and have a drink with friends.

😊🏻🏻🏻👌☕️

TYPOGRAPHY WORKSHOP | FMP

During last saturday's session at Uni, we did a workshop on type. I immediately thought that it was going to be the opportunity for me to define and maybe finalise the logo design. We have been asked to produce as many experiments we could.

I started working with paper and black ink. This techinique is the best one when not working digitally in my opinion as it is fast and allows the concept to be visualised quite well.

Experiments with ink. Type workshop. Author's own.

Some of the results I obtained (images above) were quite good, so I decided to try to design digitally. I prefer working with Illustrator rather than by hand because I reckon it is faster, more effective and much more helpful to see different solutions displayed in an artboard. Here (images below) are some examples of potential design solutions.

Different design solutions. Author's own.

What I gained from this workshop was the ability to realise several solutions for my logo. I was kind of stuck with the previous design (see blogpost here: http://nicoloellerdesign.blogspot.co.uk/2016/05/logo-development-fmp.html) but I ended up finding a second potential design. 

Second design solution. Author's own.

After a good couple of hours experimenting, I came up with this design solution which I chose as another potential one for 'Weare What We Eat' logo. As mentioned in previous posts, I wanted the logo not to be too related with recycling as I am basically branding a subscription and a bin bag. What made me chose this design is its 'awkwardness'. The shape of the text is quite unusual and so is the type. The best part, in my opinion, is the exctraction of negative areas in some letters. The design obtainen could be (and will be) used as a repetitive pattern on the different brand assets. The choice of color, with black type, makes those shapes stand out and be a remarkable identity for this brand.

I am really satisfied with the choice I made and I stated so with annotations in my sketcbook. The importance of writing notes in my sketchbook really helped me getting to the decision of choosing this design. 

🙂

LOGO DEVELOPMENT | FMP

In order to develop the brand identity for the product/subscription I want to advertise, I need to design different things. The first thing I started with is the Logo. I did some research on brands who work on environmental issues and recycling, however, I could not find much more than the rounded arrow symbolising recycling. Therefore, I started making some experiments with different media such as paper cuts, ink, paint and digital. Because I am not only branding the general action of recycling, I chose to give my logo a different look. Something which could be used to brand different products as well.

I started making some annotations and sketches on my sketchbook. Here are some examples.

Sketches. Author's own.

As shown in the image above I quite quickly came up with a potential idea for a logo. I then did some experiments with shapes and color pallettes (images below) in order to start visualising a final design.

Color pallettes. Author's own.

Logo development. Author's own.

First potential logo design. Author's own.

I decided to use two rectangular shapes as background because they did not resemble anything to me. They did not suggest what this logo is branding. The color choice I made though, was influenced by the colors of our planet (green and blue). I decided to give those two colors a transparency because I wanted to create an effect of overlaying and almost mixing. I really like working with shapes, colors and transparency when it comes to logo design. The type I chose is Helvetica oblique. Probably a bit of a safe choice and that is why I played with the word 'weare'. It can be read as 'we are' or 'wear' and in order to underline this I joined the ends of the letters e and a creating a, in my opinion, nice effect. The same effect of overlaying and transparency was added to the type too and the overall result looks quite successfull to me.
However, there are some cons about this design to me. Despite its playfulness, the type choice is way too safe. For this reason I consider this design successful but not definitive. I will make futher experimentations.

NEW DIRECTION FOR MY PROJECT | FMP

The importance of the sketchbook

After my decision of producing a video in which I would have interviewed people asking an opinion about unethical work, I realised that I was not giving any alternative but just showing an existing fact.

In my sketchbook, I took many notes and planned the video but it was going to be something not new. Something already seen and reviewed. I spent two weeks finding a solution for this problem but I was completely stuck. I felt really down with this project and I really wanted to change something about it. I decided to review my research and made some more about other ways of overconsumption. I read a lot of things about the impact we cause on the environment when producing in an unethical way. I then collected different material and put it all in my sketchbook in order to be able to explore new and more broad topics. Through my annotations, there was a part which pushed me to investigate further. The use of waste to produce fabrics. 

The importance of the sketchbook allowed me to collect different experiments and to be able to analyse and select final solutions

Online I found a project from two students in the Netherlands where they developed a process to produce a 'Vegan leather' made out of unconsumed and rotten fruit.

Here is the video showing the mechanism used: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DecEFxZ3dgw

Even if the video is available in Dutch only, their project really inspired me to look at recycling food waste and reusing it to produce fabrics in order to generate an ethical production of clothing.

On the website Love Food Hate Waste (http://www.lovefoodhatewaste.com/content/facts-about-food-waste-1) I read how every year in the UK more food is thrown away than eaten and produced. I made some annotations on my sketchbook straight away about how this is a huge waste of not food only but of labour, time and money too.

Food waste data on website Love Food Hate Waste. Author's own.

In my opinion, reducing food wastage is kind of impossible or way too committing at the moment. This is why I thought about a theoretical system to reuse food waste to produce fabric and then 'organic clothing'. 

My sketchbook really helped me a lot to analyse my research deeper and to be able to visualise more relative pieces of research in order to work better on my project and tell a journey which flows through the pages.

RESEARCH | FMP

Overconsumption

The mechanism of overconsumption always interested me during my studies. As this Final Major Project is mainly self-directed, I decided to develop something around the topic of Consumerism.

I started doing some research on how I wanted to tell a story about consumerism. There are many pieces of advertisement and campaigns which aim is to raise awareness on a determined topic.

I then asked myself some questions. How am I going to raise awareness and about what? 

We are always bombarded by the media, however, what we hear and read is not always what is happening behind big corporations and brands. Making some more research online, at the library at uni and visiting some exhibitions, made me come up with the idea of revealing or at least raising awareness about what is hidden behind big clothing companies. I visited Oxford Street in London to have a general look at some shops such as H&M, Topman/Topshop, Nike and Primark. 

Thanks to a workshop/meeting with the graphic designer Johnathan Barnbrook which took place a few months ago at uni, I discovered Adbusters. Adbusters is a company based in Canada famous for its magazine. They do really interesting pieces of graphic design and campaigns against consumption, media and today's society. 

Adbusters logo and campaign against fast food chains. Author's own.

Series of campaigns from Adbusters against brands such as Nike, McDonalds and Pepsi. Auther's own.

Then I researched some other artists such as Barbara Kruger and Banksy. As well as Adbusters, they both do some really strong work about the relation between society and corporations. Barbara Kruger works with photography and typography and what I really liked about her work is the perfect blend of these two disciplines. She uses black and white photos then accentuated by red and white text and frames. In my opinion, her work is really strong and powerful and shows a good ability to produce images using photos and graphic design.

Barbara Kruger. Author's own.

On the other hand, the graffiti/street art artist Banksy really caught my eye because his work is extremely strong and tend to always have a negative side to me. Here are some examples of his work.

Banksy. Author's own.

After researching artists and studios, I started asking myself what pieces I was going to produce. How was I going to raise awareness on unethical work, child exploitation and other non-human conditions behind some big clothing brands? I thought about when I was walking on Oxford St and wanted to know what people know and think about unethical work and its subsidisation. 

Interviewing people while they are shopping and asking their opinion was my intention. A record of the interviews would make a nice video for my campaign and actually show people's knowledge and opinions.

I will make further research into other campaigns and find other several ways to resolve the project.

RISO PRINTING WORKSHOP | FMP

During last saturday's session, we have been introduced to a new printing system called RISO printing. After developing a design for a concept we liked from the exhibitions at the Wellcome Collection, we printed it using this technique. The result obtained was pretty good however we faced several problems with the machine. I could potentially use this system to print work for my FMP as it works well with graphics, shapes and overlaying.

Author's own.

Author's own.

THE WELLCOME COLLECTION | FMP

Last week we went to visit two exhibitions at the Wellcome Collection. States of Mind and This is a Voice. Both were quite interesting especially for the layout of the space and its interaction with the visitors. The characteristics I liked the most from the exhibitions were the ability to control and direct sound and light. In my opinion walking through the space was a really interesting journey. Curiosity and surprise were the two factors which hit me the most. At the end of the visit, we went to the second floor of the building where there was the Reading Room. I really liked this space thanks to the interiors and the vibe. It was a relaxing space where to study, read and share opinions and ideas. In a corner I found a really interesting collection of posters for a campaign about the prevention of AIDS. Each poster was from a different country and it was really interesting too see how different cultures, styles, etc... influenced the design.

Although the exhibition was not related to my practice and to my FMP I really enjoyed spending time with my peers sharing thoughts about the space.

Author's own.