From here, I thought it best to start looking at packaging design, what I did and didn't want from my packaging.
I started looking at using the covers on the outer packaging, but I just felt that with al the vivid colours on the books, that this was a bit much and that minimalism was the best approach. I also tried a photo and biography of John Steinbeck, but I thought this was a bit cliche and unnecessary. I decided to stick with type and looked at both Clarendon and Calibri, which I'd narrowed it down to. However, after printing on stocks I'm leaning towards Clarendon, the contrast between the angular nature of serifs and the smooth vectors is quite nice and ensures the type doesn't get lost in the design, where as with calibri, for me, personally, it's all a little too smooth. Going with this and wanting simplicity,I experimented with laying it out in different ways and alignments, settling for 42 point, central aligned with an underscore, which looked nicer than big areas of space sitting between the letters. I really want to experiment with foil block/spot varnish for this. The last two nets in the PDF are for print, one is for white type to spot varnish over. With the other blank net, I can try spot varnish with no type underneath and also foil blocking.
I also did a quick few bookmark layouts.
I quickly googled what the usual formats are for bookmarks and a few websites (on context blog) suggested 2inch x 6 inch. This fit within the covers nicely and is a good dimension to work with, visually. I hate the attempt to cram all the covers in on one bookmark and feel that this would be a disappointing looking bookmark. The plan then becomes to have a bookmark of each cover inside each book, allowing me to apply the design across a range. I really like the last one, it reflects the book covers and the outer packaging quite well and it's nicely laid out. I might just tweak the font size a little it could also be good to spot varnish/foil block these. So more to come with that. In terms of other promotional material, it's a toss up between a poster and a postcard. As the target audience myself, I know that I enjoy posters and throw away postcards which suggests, that's what I should make. However, there are issues with putting a poster of A3 or A2 format in small packaging: it will be folded (a lot) and the folds will be an irregular format making it look uneven. To y mind this suggests that posters should be shipped separately and provided at point of sale rather than within the packaging. My advertising can promote the free poster too. I also need to think about promotional material for digital delivery, I'll probably look at that in the next post.
And here's some experimentation with all the stocks available to us at college.
This is thick card, I thought it might be good to use this instead of thin paper to make it more durable and in a real product situation, I would use a card stock. However, this college card stock is horrible, it soaks up a lot of the ink because it's uncoated and the grainy texture really doesn't suit the crisp-ness of my designs.
The matte stock that I procured form digital dungeon was much better in terms of colour qaulity, however, it does scratch really easily, which suggests to me that although I'm most likely going to go with this stock, in a live brief I'd source a more durable paper stock that doesn't damage quite so easily.
This is bulky newsprint, I tried it because it looked awesome on Gasi's books, however mine are a very different kettle of fish, and again the colour quality suffering, really isn't good for what I'm trying to do. Also a thin stock isn't brilliant for a cover, it needs to be weight and durable.
The stocks above and below are water colour paper and slate sugar paper respectively, and they gave me some of the most god-awful finishes I've ever seen, it's fair to say I won't use them.
Solution: Use the matte stock available in college, but explore other paper stocks on context blog, find out what they are, chose one and spec it out on the design board.
Here's my crit feedback form:
Mostly it's about the typography. I'm no expert on type (I want to understand more, hence this project), so I take other's opinions very seriously. With that in mind, heres a pdf of my response tweaking, written within that is a lot of explanation so please ensure you read the text too, if you want to know what the hell I'm doing. Also, I made the column a little wider than it was before, so more words fit on a line.
From here, I laid out the bar codes in illustrator to ensure it was consistantly in the same place throughout. I also ammended the rabbit to a mouse on the advice of some crit feedback, which is was that in terms of concept it's a bit jarring because the others seem a little more literal (other than tortilla flat) because the title has the word mouse in it, where as the image is the image of a rabbit. In the book though, there is an exchange between George and Lenny about him holding onto a dead mouse, so having a mouse makes sense conceptually and as a literal interpretation of the title, so I'm going to go with this.
What to do from here?
-Make some templates for spot varnishing the covers and foil blocking/spot varnishing the packaging for testing out tomorrow.
-Try different things for packaging: black paper on card? print out on card? laminated card? laminated print on card?
-finalise promotional material ready for print booked at tomorrow at 4.
-explore the digital side of things
-and look at advertising and potential in store promotion layout.
From this I can start mocking up my boards.
No comments:
Post a Comment