Evaluation

Looking back at the module I can confidently say I thoroughly enjoyed the whole experience, unlike other modules where I had a negative outlook on my skills and future this module has really made me into the confident designer I am today. Within this module my confidence and enjoyment has grown as I have started to understand where I fit in to the creative industry and what it is I have to offer. This has definitely improved through studio visits, portfolio surgeries and interviews, things that at the start of the module I would have had no confidence to do at all. I am know very proud of the work I am creating and can see how much I have developed not just physical skills but my knowledge and understanding developed through thorough research and investigation into branding. It took some low points in the last module that really made me question myself and my place on this course to make me realise how much I enjoy it and why I am here. So the beginning of this module got off to quite a slow start due to this.

This module has been one of the most rewarding for me, I have gained 2 x 2 months paid work placements with Love – Manchester, Thompson Brand Partners, 2 weeks at Vast and Winning the Sh! Awards and a 6 month paid placement. It has really given me great confidence and the ability to see beyond this course and into my future. This has helped when selecting briefs as I know what I want in my portfolio, a strong branding portfolio fully covering all creative and interactive promotion and experience. Creating an ‘Experience’ for a brand has become the key to my work, story telling through graphic outlooks to communicate the philosophy of the brand to the consumer. I love looking at the detail in promotion, how consumers can engage with the brand and what it can offer them. This was picked up on in my portfolio when approaching companies and is a unique skill a have to offer. I found that I love working with ideas, campaigns and concepts anything thought provoking and highly creative that can break the boundries of the the standard promotion I want to be part of.

Within this module I have made full use of all the facilities in college which was part of my SOI, this wasn’t necessarily intentionally but was a way of creating professional pieces of design which I felt was lacking in my portfolio. Screenprinting, lasercutting, digital print and woodwork have all helped me explore promotion further and has meant my projects weren’t limited to printed media. I loved getting stuck into these workshops as they are so rewarding to see the finished design.

Working with Lauren Carande – Brief 2 Fashion Branding meant that I was in contact with printers, stockists etc which was a great opportunity for me to expand my knowledge on printing for large scale work which has put me in good stead for future work. It was really rewarding to see my branding designs on such an amazing collection of clothing, I feel privileged to have worked with Lauren as we have had a great working relationship.

Working with Jonny on the Crossover brief was excellent and definitely the best brief throughout my time here on the course. We worked exceptionally well together sharing all the work load and this resulted in a fully branded project covering all aspects.

The Waterstones brief was quite disappointing as I ran out of time to expand this futher but my pitch won the 2 month paid placement so it was definitely worth doing and documented my ideas well.

I have also fully branded myself as a designer and got my work out into the creative industry through my own website, Behance site, portfolio and contacting companies. Something I would have previously found extremely daunting but now love showing my work to people.   

I feel that my documentation through blogging has let me down within this module as I got so into the projects that I ran away with the production and lost track of my blogging. Apart from this my time management has improved a lot as I had placements and studio visits to fit in so I had to be very strict with my organisation which has paid off.

Although the last three years on this course has developed my skills and understanding it is this last module that has really shaped me and allowed me to create my own individual practice. I feel prepared and excited to step out into industry with a thoroughly creative portfolio, great advice from tutors, peers and designers and a positive outlook on my future.

Brief 5 - Waterstones - EVALUATION

Open publication - Free publishing

This project was for a pitch for Love to win a 2 month paid placement. I had 2weeks in which to prepare a pitch to present to them. Although with the work load I only spent a week on this project. Andy Lodge gave me some good advice on how to make a professional pitch and how Love pitch to clients which really helped to get an insight into how to visualise my ideas. I wanted to extend this brief further for my FMP but unfortunately ran out of time!

Although on a postive note I won the 2 month paid placement :) yey so it can't have been to bad.

In Every Sense of the Word.....

So after my presentation with Love, they really liked the 'In Every Sense of the Word' Campaign although suggested taking it past the standard promotion.... I was in such a rush and found it difficult to visualize my ideas to the extent in a presentable way so I feel that I held back abit with my ideas. Although the ability of being able to speak through my ideas/ process really helped to get the message across how it could be extended. So with the advice given I will continue on this route!

Waterstones Pitch

Pitch for Waterstones campaign.

2 initial ideas to take forward.

Open publication - Free publishing - More brief 5

Feedback:

Take forward the 'In every sense of the word' campaign and fully explore all possibilities, go crazy!
Really try to break away from their standard promotion styles and fully explore a big brand campaign.

Choose a career in health

Rochelle Donald

A series of book cuts for a Waterstone’s advertising campaign. Hand-cut images from the pages of selected books and a projector light to create the shadows. Aiming to convey the idea of books literally ‘coming to life’.

Creative Review

Out with the new and in with the old

Graphic Design, Type / Typography

Posted by Mark Sinclair, 12 January 2012, 9:28    Permalink    Comments (51)

Waterstones' identity has moved from Baskerville in full caps, to regular type (top row); to FS Albert Pro in 2010 (bottom left); and now, back to Baskerville, but without an apostrophe (bottom right)
In its second rebrand in as many years, Waterstones has ditched its 2010 identity, reverted back to Baskerville type and dropped an apostrophe. Frivolous? Well, with apparently only a handful of some 275 stores to change back to the old identity, the move is effectively bringing the previous rebrand to a halt. And that might be cheaper...
Back in May 2010, Waterstones' then parent company, HMV, asked their preferred branding consultants venturethree to design a new identity for the booksellers. The agency came up with the sans serif 'w', shown above, combining that with a lowercase treatment of the name set in FS Albert Pro.
While the new identity was trumpeted by Waterstones as a reflection of its move into online, it only appeared on a handful of physical shops. Often it was used on in-store display material while the exterior shop signage was left in the old style (as on the Oxford Street branch near the CR offices). Despite venturethree's efforts to create a 'flexible' identity system, the occurence of both treatments in the same shop just looked messy.
In effect Waterstones' new MD James Daunt is putting a stop to that. He claims that the brand is now "deserving of a capital 'W' and a font that reflects authority and confidence." As regards the removal of the apostrophe he says that "in a digital world of urls and email addresses [it offers] a more versatile and practical spelling."
So essentially Waterstones is canning a rebrand that has taken nearly two years to roll out across a handful of stores. But it has dressed this up as a return to a "much loved" high street identity. While there's something to be said for cutting your losses – and, personally, I prefer the classic Waterstones branding – the move seems more like a debrand than a rebrand. But Waterstones can hardly be accused of inviting the usual "how much did that cost" invective, so perhaps the move is something to applaud?
Yet the reasoning behind taking out the apostrophe still grates with me. Surely most internet users already know they don't feature in web and email addresses, even if the company name requires one? Lowercase type used to be the default for brands who wanted to say 'we're online', but claiming to be more in tune with the digital world is a poor excuse for removing an element of punctuation that is already under threat.
Save the apostrophe! The campaign starts here.

Waterstones Brief

Open publication - Free publishing - More brief 5

Jonathon Lee

Date: September 2010

The Brief: Tube car panel ads are boring. It is one of the only times when you have a captive audience so let's make the most of it. Give commuters something good to read. Do what the majority of ads fail to do. Entertain! When people get off the tube they shouldn't be thinking, "I'm going to buy a book", they should be thinking, "I'm going to buy a book from Waterstones".

Thermochromic Paint

Waterstones Initial Ideas

The Smell of Books Inspires Karl Lagerfeld

Karl Lagerfeld plans on creating a truly unique fragrance. Not inspired by flowers, fruits, the wind, the ocean or any other element of nature, this perfume will borrow the scent of books. Yes, the smell of ink on paper has got a special charm, but we honestly can’t imagine how that fragrance can be alluring on someone’s skin.
Lagerfeld is known for his important role in the fashion industry, but what most people don’t know is that he is also very passionate about reading. He even has a huge personal library of over 300,000 books, a bookstore called “7L” and a book publishing company known as “Edition 7L”.
For the new fragrance that he plans on putting on the market, Lagerfeld collaborates with Geza Schön, a perfumer from Berlin. No further details are available at the moment, but we would looove to test the perfume sometime!

Can the Human Brain and eBooks Get Along?

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Outside of the tactile feel and smell of books, one of the biggest mental barriers people have against picking up an e-Reader for the first time is the assumption that one’s brain simply doesn’t retain information attained via a screen as well as it does via the page. If you’re on the fence about getting an e-Reader yourself, or this issue comes up often when you try and sell your family and friends on the Kindle, there may finally be some science to back you up.
The first thing one has to understand is that reading is not a natural process for the human brain. Instead, it’s a technology that we’ve cobbled together because of our natural ability in the area of language, as well as our god-given visual acuity. While many skeptics of e-Reader technology insist that reading the printed page is as natural as breathing air, the fact of the matter is that humans have only really been reading in great numbers for the last 500 some-odd years since the printing press went into mainstream use. Whether consciously or not, we developed the technology to fit around the way our brains process information.
A French neurological study on the subject of the human brain and reading found that humans read best when the ventral visual system (the part of the brain responsible for building a representation of the world outside of the body), is stimulated by words displayed in a familiar format. If words are represented in an unfamiliar way, a different, slower pathway in the brain is activated that focuses on processing the information from each letter individually.
So what does that mean? It’s possible that, for certain people, the experience of reading on a computer screen is unfamiliar in the same way that seeing letters jumbled or rotated is unfamiliar. They’re forced to use that secondary ventral pathway to process the information they take in, which means that it not only takes longer for them to understand what they’re reading, but it can be more mentally taxing as well. Combine that with the very human predilection to be distracted by all the temptations of the Internet, and I think it’s easy to see why some people observe that their digital reading experiences aren’t quite up to the standard held by books.
That’s the rub. The very design of the e-Reader, the very intention of the e-Ink technology, is to replicate that paper experience as crisply as possible. There aren’t yet studies to support it, but for many people who grew up with the printed page, the clarity of e-Ink is enough to stimulate that primary ventral visual system, making reading as smooth as possible. And indeed, for younger folks already accustomed to reading on a screen, the e-Ink might not be necessary at all.
In my opinion, the biggest enemy of the eBook moving forward is companies like Apple, who are reportedly quite interested in getting into the e-Reader market. While I don’t doubt their ability to produce a quality product, Apple’s habit of trying to make do-it-all gadgets has me concerned that their version of an e-Reader is going to focus on all the bells and whistles instead of the literary experience. I fear that while I’m trying to read about how awesome Andrew Jackson was, it’ll be death by a million distractions, from Twitter updates, to instant messaging, to, heaven forbid, phone calls from Mom.
As long as e-Readers succeed at keeping the background noise to a minimum, there’s no reason eBooks can be just as immersive as the printed page. We’re likely never going to do away with books, for a variety of reasons, but it’s not because eBooks don’t work. It’s just a matter of whether we have the wherewithal to just sit down and pay attention.

Waterstones Brief

Brief 5 has changed a lot... I was trying to keep with my SOI but also add something new to my portfolio. I have been sent the Waterstones brief I am giving myself 2 weeks to design and pitch to the company... Although the pitch will mainly be mock-ups and ideas I will make finals for submission!

Challenge: 


Amazon is pushing us out of business. Their aggressively commercial strategy beats us on price, stock, innovation, and convenience. But they don’t love books. And we really do. We don’t want to go quietly into the night. So we’re looking for big ideas that get people excited about shopping with us. Think of it like this: we need to show people that Waterstones is an experience, not just a transaction.

So, what is that experience?

We need radical solutions to change people’s perceptions of our brand.



Consideration: 


We want to be on the frontline of an ongoing culture war about the value of the written word. But we don’t want to attack Amazon or e-readers. We want to romance books and reading. (Without being boring and middle-aged about it.) But we do have to consider how our argument stacks up against Amazon’s offering. We can’t beat them on stock, for example, so how do we counter

that? Ideally we would like to demonstrate our passion for book culture and how our personal expertise shines through. A much richer experience than the cold “people who bought this, also bought this:” algorithm. What are some other problems? You might need to think deeply to diagnose issues we’re not aware of yet.



What’s our argument: 


- We are a respected heritage brand, with decades of bookselling experience.

 - We sell books. Nothing else.

- Books make you better; broaden your horizons with us.


- Books are beautiful.




Suggested approaches: 


- How can we tailor our stores to make them more compelling experiences at key touchpoints? (Window displays, merchandising, staffing, personalisation, etc.)


- An advertising idea that brings your strategy to life as a meaningful call to action.

Molly & Andrew

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• Launch Collective is a strategic planning, consulting agency for entrepreneurs looking to launch and cultivate sustainable businesses. Subsequently, the logo and business cards convey the idea of launching. We art directed a photoshoot of miscellaneous object to represent the Collective’s personalities as well as the services they provide to their clients.

Ro and Co- Invites

• Every year RoAndCo sends out a Christmas gift to special clients, friends and collaborators. Having recently moved into a new studio space, we wanted to tie in our 2011 Christmas gift with our office warming party. Based on the theme of RoAndCordials, we collaborated with Morris Kitchen who provided us with beautifully bottled and equally delicious Ginger Syrup. We printed the bottle labels in the style of traditional medicine/cordial bottles, including Ginger Syrup cocktail recipes and Happy Holiday messages in the text.
  
  In honor of our new White Street office and the festive season, we decided on a White theme for our party - and nestled the bottles on white shredded paper in a white cardboard box. The party invites were letterpressed in the same style as the bottle labels, and placed on top of the bottles. To remind our guests to wear white, we stamped this message onto small white squares of fabric and placed on top of the invite. For a final touch, we printed addressable stickers that wrapped around the box, mimicking the invite and bottle label.
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IL — Il Sole 24 Ore

• We started collaborating with IL – Intelligence In Lifestile Magazine, supplement of Il Sole 24 Ore.
  Under the creative direction of Mr. Francesco Franchi, each month we develop the title typography for the brand new column “Remo Contro” written by the italian philosopher Remo Bodei.

  
  

  We will update this page with a new typography work every month.
• Curiosità
  IL N. 32
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• Vita
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• Povertà

  IL N. 30
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• Rischio
  

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• Legalità

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