Wednesday 21 May 2014

Brief 1 // Imprint // Final Evaluation

Brief 01: Imprint
This was the very first brief of the year; I found that this brief got me back into the flow of designing and thinking creatively. It was a good introduction into getting back into the flow of working properly.

The idea of the brief was to create a brand that I can use in appropriate briefs throughout the year for anything that consists of publication & editorial design. This design area is a big proportion of my practice and having a sub brand I can us for this makes it look more professional.

I enjoyed doing working on this brief, as it was pure branding. Branding is something that I am interested in and feel as though I have a good grasp of it, but it can always be improved, hence why I chose to do this brief. It was a good brief because I was designing a brand, which was for myself, this made it easier for me to do because I knew what I wanted it to be designed like.

The hardest part of the brief was creating the brand guidelines, this was the first time I have designed a brand guidelines and I did find it quite hard to produce. Designing the brand & identity was fine, along with each of the component that made up the brand, it was the information and body copy that needed to be displayed to describe the individual components and inform the user how they should be used that was the tricky part. I think because I’m not the best writer I struggle with this side of the brief, but through researching into existing brand guidelines and looking at how they have written the content, I did manage to write it all myself, which I am pretty proud of.  Looking back at the guidelines, I think there are pages within it that could be changed and some that could be added in to explain the company better and describe the brand story and values further.

Aside to the brand guidelines, I used the identity to create business stationery, this part was very enjoyable, I like creating branded stationery because it challenges you to create a consistent design over products which all have a different purpose and different formats. I think using the imprint identity created visually pleasing stationery that all fits together as a set and communicates the identity of the company.

I do feel that this brief has gone on for longer than I wanted to, but I think that was because there was a lot of other course related things going on at the beginning of the year and I couldn't get into a constant flow to work on the project and finish it quicker. Looking back at the project, if I had the chance to revisit it, I would approach it in a different way. As a bespoke company that produces bespoke publications, this would have been more of a focus for me and using emboss / deboss and quality stocks may have changed the appearance and perspective of the brief.

That said I am still happy with the outcomes of this brief. The brand guideline foe me is the strongest product created within the project, but I think overall the best part of it, is the logo mark as it is quite innovative and creates a pencil or binding tool within the white space of the letters. Along with these the accent colours of the branding are bright and visually engaging they both work together well and have created a contemporary style to the company branding. I feel this is what the publishing sector needs as many identities for them are quite old fashioned. The brand guidelines is created to a high quality and uses a different type of binding method, this again puts into practice the type of publication design that the company would create in real life. Finally the brand works across all the material / products produced and creates a consistent design that communicates what the company is and the style of it.

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