Branding project

When we were first given this project I started brainstorming different ideas, looking at the products my brand would produce. I also looked at previous company logos for some of the types of brands I had in mind for example, hair care and beauty products, Juice, cafe and bakery brands.

Using inspiration from my research I started sketching some ideas of names for my brand and what types of logos could be used. For example I started looking at how typography could be used to create image and how image and type might merge to create a simple but effective logo.

When looking at Coffee shop brands and their logos I came across a few that incorporated images of nature, e.g. trees and manipulated the type so that the two complimented each other (see previous images). Being a huge fan of illustrating images to do with nature, I attempted to sketch ideas of how this could be incorporated in my logo and I quite like how some of the ideas turned out. 

During my group crit, it was brought to my attention that I would not be able to use any logo names with "fair trade" in it as it could be classed as copyright. However some members of the group seemed to like the name "pulp", an idea that I had for a juice brand, and they merged this with my idea of having the word "kitchen" in the name. In this case my group crit actually proved to be very useful as it gave me a new name and direction to go in, "Pulp Kitchen", a brand which I intended to be a fair trade cafe.

Much of the inspiration behind this idea came from my study of Geography for A-level, as a large proportion of the curriculum required studying the advantages and disadvantages of bottom up development/ "grass-root" initiatives in less developed countries. Unlike aid money which is often lost through the corrupt governments of some developing countries, these initiatives work with communities teaching them new skills and inject money into communities to help with the overall development of the country.

Fair trade is trade between companies in developed countries and producers in developing countries in which fair prices are paid to the producers. Therefore like "grass-root" initiatives, my brand would help with the development of less developed countries with the cafes buying products from farmers in these communities for fair prices. Everything in the cafe would be made from fair trade produce, thus helping to inject money into less developed communities around the world.

I then started to experiment with colour  and different hand drawn typography, working with the image of a chef's hat referring to the idea of a "kitchen". I was quite happy with how the type and image worked together, however one of the tutors said the idea was to simple and obvious so I started exploring different ways and mediums of expressing the words in the brand name.

"Pulp" could be seen as quite a gruesome word as often people find it the annoying aspect of drinking freshly squeezed juice drinks. However by printing with oranges using ink and acrylic paint I started to experiment with presenting the word in a visually appealing way, looking at the beauty of the inside structure of an orange.

I experimented by printing with different colours and decided to use the colours of the fair trade logo, blue and green.

I then used a quarter of the orange to form part of the "P's" in "Pulp" so that the image formed the typography.

I liked printing with acrylic paint as it created a nice 3D texture but I also liked the visual effect of printing with ink as, due to the ink getting in-between the individual pulps, a sort of vainy image was produced.

A week and a half into the project we were asked to present our logo so far in black and white. Without having settled on a final idea for a logo yet, I just drew on my previous experiments with making the type out of the image of a printed orange and added the word kitchen after with an illustration of a chef's hat.

I also experimented with adding my favourite medium, watercolour, to the logo applying the same idea of using green and blue, the colours in the fair trade logo. On our feedback forms for this halfway project review, my tutor commented that I needed to sort out proportions and layout of the text and that the logo almost looked like two separate logos.

Agreeing with part of the comments, I started to look at how the two words could be unified in one simpler logo. I experimented with using photocopies of the printed orange images to mirror the colour and image of the fair trade logo. Despite thinking this worked well, I further experimented with tracing over a picture of the inside of an orange, that I took, using a black fine-liner. I then photocopied this a few times and experimented with injecting colour in the white spaces keeping with the colours of fair trade, blue and green, at first just blending the colours randomly in the image and then mirroring the pattern on the fair trade logo.

I decided that I liked the first experiment best, blending the blue and green watercolours randomly in the image. I then started testing different type faces on photoshop and how this would work with the chosen image and colours. I decided that white was the best colour to have the text in as it stood out the most from the intricate and colourful pattern in the background.

Graphics pathway- week 4 After effects workshop

My last workshop was on After Effects and how to make simple animations using basic techniques. I have never used this application before as was the case with all of the other adobe programmes before I came to Ravensbourne. Despite getting lost a few times, the step by set instructions on how to do certain functions and produce different affects really helped my understanding. Also some steps were quite repetitive when doing each of the 4 animations so it made the use and functions of the tools easier to pick up. However I don't know how much of it I would remember if I was asked to do an animation on this programme again.

This was perhaps one of the more simpler animations we produced in the workshop however I still feel it uses the available tools very affectively. I enjoyed doing this one as we were left to play around with and experiment with getting the reflections of the balls to make it look like they were landing on water. It also opened my eyes to how a very simple effect can be used to create something that theoretically seems not so simple to produce.

This animation is one that seems like it would be very complicated to produce, however using the tools creatively and to our advantage we were shown that it is not as complicated as previously thought. This animation made it increasingly clearer on how to use keys frames, as by drawing an axis for the moon to go around the earth we were able to go along the timeline and set the positions that it would be at different moments among the time line. Therefore we were able to control the speed and route of the object which resulted in it smoothly orbiting the earth. The typography on this animation was actually not intentional. When I typed out my chosen text it was already set to this font and when I enlarged it I realised that the lettering had skyscrapers cut out of it and thought it complimented the word "earth" well giving the viewer a sense of what the 21st century has brought to the world.

For this animation we again utilised the key frames tool and line tool to create a path for our names to be written on the screen. As this was my first time using the pen tool I wasn't used to how it worked so got frustrated many times and accidentally wrote my name in many disjointed lines. However after figuring out that this was the reason why the animation wasn't running smoothly, I used some spare time at the end to correct the path to just one continuous line and I felt that the improved version bellow was much better.

This was perhaps the most complicated animation to do as we were working with video footage and had to get used to editing videos on After Effects instead of just using still images. After getting lost and asking for help a few to many times, I finally ended up with how the outcome should have looked. 

Overall I felt that the last animation we did was perhaps my least favourite to produce although I have to admit that visually it is very effective. I also thought that the "Earth" animation was my favourite as I like how the tools and effects that After Effects had to offer were utilised very well and creatively here.