Project Packaging, Final Projects

So ya'll have seen The Amphibian—he was my solution to week 3's Project Packaging challenge which was to take Barbie or GI Joe and create a new, original identity. Wanting to spread peace, love and understanding to the world, the Post Bellum series could also include Tour De France Joe, Mt. Everest Joe, Scuba Joe, 8 Olympic Swimming Medals Joe (ok, that name might need to be tweaked a bit), Eco Challenge Joe... you get the idea. Think I should figure out how to pitch it to Hasbro?

Each week of Project Packaging, we had a different challenge and only a week to get it done—to a point that's essentially finished, not just comp-ed up. Every week there was a winner and your stuff got displayed at school for the following week. Since we're all paying for an education, no one got voted off. :) If you want to check out the class blog, you can see what other people did. Here are a few of my other projects...

Week 1:
Design packages for two bags of munchies—chips, cheetos, whatever... one original flavor and one alternate flavor... using only hand done type and illustrations. We were allowed to use a typeface for the fine print but were supposed to come up with illustrations for the major type and graphics. We could either use the company's existing logo or design a new one... which I did since it fit better with my design.

Zapp's Potato Chips are made in Grammercy, LA, just outside of New Orleans. I thought it would be fun to give it a bit of bayou flavor, especially in celebration of the cajun crawtators. These are YUMMY chips, by the way.

Here's the original bag design:





And here's my re-design:









Week 2:
We did pet food and the only stipulations were that we had to use photography and of the two packages, one had to be a can. I got to do cat food... for some reason I didn't take a picture of the can. The judges really felt this missed the mark as they thought the barley was wheat and it says "no wheat" on the front of the package. They said they wanted to see chickens on the package. Right. That's what I was thinking too... but... well... This one didnt' make it to my final critique as we only had to choose 4 of the 6 projects to revise. I liked it... but as far as communicating what's in the food...it kinda flopped. The original is on the right, my re-design on the left:



Week 3: The Amphibian

Week 4: BEER!!
Design a 6 pack (or 4 pack) of some type of bottled beverage using only ONE Typeface (which was assigned to us) and minimal other graphics. I was assigned "Excelsior" which is a kind of boring, standard serif typeface. It was created as a newpaper face in the 20s, in case you wondered.

I chose Smithwick's Ale (pronounced "smitticks" or "smiddicks" for those irishly challenged) and gave it a medieval, castle feel—in celebration of Excelsior and in light of the fact that Kilkenney Ireland, where the ale is made, has one of the oldest standing castle towers in existence. The package is bigger than most six packs and would likely be a total headache to have on store shelves...but the thought was that once the adults are done drinking the beer, they can give the "castle" to their kids to play with... a re-use is better than straight into the recycle bin, right? That's what I thought!! The castle bricks are all made out of type.

The 6 pack—hexagonal shaped and in the style of a castle!:


Up closer, the banner is a hand painted watercolor I did:


And the bottle labels:




Week 5:
Find a product at Walmart, made for Walmart and labeled with one of it's brands (Mainstays, Home Trends, Faded Glory, etc.) and create a packaging re-design to allow the product to compete with Target...but at close to the same Walmart price point. In other words, don't break the packaging budget so that Walmart would have to charge more. I opted for a stainless steel coffee tumbler (it had only a sticker on the bottom), coffee scoops and filters which were both in non-descript baggies.



Week 6:
International Foods. We just had to find some food product that's made in another country and re-design the packaging...again, two packages and one had to be a can. I went with three since my brand had two nice bottles as well. AND, I actually WON this one... the final week. You can see the original packaging here and here (the Sofrito ACTUALLY uses comic sans as it's main typeface). The two bottles don't go together at all so I was looking to make a more consistent line. And the tomato paste didn't exist but I needed a can so invented it. Here are the final three:



That's it for Project Packaging! It was a great class and I learned a ton... especially the fact that I don't think I want to purely design packaging for a living. It was intense to have to get these done in only a week but I learned how to move much faster with my decisions and how to just pick a direction and go with my gut...which, in most cases, is the right direction. Nice to know...

Triathlete GI Joe, Final Version

So I revised some things on The Amphibian packaging and wound up showing this final version to my critique panel. They weren't crazy about the army green—they actually thought it was brown—but whatever. I thought it worked better than the weird sky/water splotches on the first version. Just in case anyone recognizes a photo they took and posted on flickr, know that I've made absolutely no money by using your photographs!! Oh, and The Amphibian's civilian name might look familiar to some of you...














Notice Amelia in disguise!

Fun with Type

OK, so it's been awhile... break is over and I'm slowly easing into quarter number 5. I got pretty slammed at the end of last quarter! Totally intense...

A friend of mine needed some stuff done for her practice so I agreed to do it on trade... nice for me, eh? I worked on these over break and love how they came out...





I think I might be a type addict... it's SO much fun to work with hand drawn type...

The Amphibian!

So I'm in a packaging class and each week we have a different challenge - like project runway. You can see what we've been doing here but I had to post this because it just makes me laugh. We had to "re-brand" either Barbie or GI Joe - you know, make a new version of the doll that hasn't been done yet. I was assigned GI Joe and I don't know about you, but have you ever seen how freakin' violent those toys are? Anyway, I wound up using Ken and just called him GI Joe - he's THE AMPHIBIAN - the Ironman Triathlete for the new Post-Bellum line of GI Joes. The series would continue with Tour De France Joe, Mt. Everest Scaling Joe, Scuba Joe, Michael Phelps Joe...you get the idea. I just giggled to myself the whole time i was making him. His swim cap is the thumb of a rubber glove. And he has a bike too - I haven't downloaded the pics from my camera yet... more to come.

Perennial Obsession

When I moved to Georgia, I got really excited about the fact that I was going to be able to have blue hydrangeas



and wisteria



and all other kinds of warmer zone perennials. The flowers in Vermont are certainly wonderful and I miss the cool summer breezes too but how amazing to have a hedge of hydrangeas instead of boring boxwood. It's been a definite trade off though and what I think I've missed the most are the lilacs.



Georgia doesn't have lilacs, and while I'm developing a fondness for the crape myrtle (I live two blocks off Myrtle STREET actually),



it's just not the same as the trusty old lilac. There's something so classic, comforting and homey about a big old lilac bush. I can't wait until I have my own yard again. There will be perennials and vegetables GALORE!!

For my Type is Mass class with Anne, we had to make a self-promo piece that was rooted in something we cared a lot about or an experience we'd had...something that revealed a piece of ourselves while at the same time delivering our contact info etc.

I chose to do a suite of three leave-behind pieces (I'd likely only leave one at a time but variety is good, especially if I were to interview with more than one person) based on my love of perennials. I used bulbs for ease/practicality... each one contains a bulb of either a daffodil, hyacinth or lily (well, actually, they're shallots and garlic...it wasn't bulb season at the nursery) and the concept is that I'm a "Perennial Designer"...a metaphor of me as a hardy, dependable, carefree, colorful, disease and pest-free designer (that last one was thrown in to prove I have a sense of humor too.) On the front is my contact info and a big H carved out with plastic backing to see the bulb inside. One side shows the watercolor illustration I did, a second side has the USDA hardiness zone map and the third side lists the characteristics of a perennial designer. On the bottom of each box is the name of the flower (in calligraphic hand drawn text) with planting/care instructions. I used the HTF typeface Archer, a beautiful slab serif, on all of the keystroked type.

I started by making a paper comp so I knew what size to make the box, then flattened the box and used watercolor paints for the illustrations (each illustration was close to 10" high but I made sure they were proportional to the final box size so I could reduce them easily):





Then I drew the decorative frame and wrote the flower names for the bottom of each box. About 100 frames and 30-40 iterations of each word later, these were the best:






I scanned everything and then placed it all in InDesign and set the Archer Text. Here are the finals of each side... the flower illustration wrapped onto the top of each box:






The finals are 3.5 inches tall by 2 inches square (actually, business card dimensions). Each piece is attractive enough that you wouldn't mind keeping it on your desk (with my handy contact info just an arm's reach away) and you can always think of me when your flower blooms each spring! My critique panel thought this idea was a keeper.

Editorial Icons

OK, I'm already bored trying to do this in chronological order so I'm just going to add labels to each post designating which quarter the work was done in.

While we were working on our cut paper posters, we had to go back through all of our thumbnail sketches and pick 5 of just our animal, and 5 others of our animal in the style of our civilization. I don't exactly know why they're called editorial icons. Once we had the 10, we had to shrink them down so they were no more than 2 inches at the biggest dimension and place them on a 10" x 10" sheet in such a way as to force the viewer's eye to go to the strongest icon. This would be a tactic to use when showing clients multiple options of logos, for example, when you want them to choose a particular one...you can actually position them on the page using directional forces (swelling, point, centripetal forces) to get them to choose the one you think is the best design.

Here are my non-civ icons (ie, just my sheep). We were also given criteria that we had to meet, such as at least one icon has to be a notan:







And here are the Absaroke/Crow sheep:







Here's how I placed them on the page. They had to be equidistant from each edge, which by default made them centered. The most powerful spot on the page is always the top right so that's where you're supposed to look. Sylvia thought they worked okay so that was good enough for me!




I just remembered how many friggin' times I had to draw a sheep.