Category: ADZ6777- TECHNICAL

As i am working for a young demographic there are a lot of cards on the market for children with their ages on them. To tap into this market i have created a card aimed at the specific age of 8. This design is a development from a previous post where i had the text but was not sure in which direction to develop the background

So this design ties in with my collection i have decided to add a border of monsters, extracted from my gift roll design. This card should help to tie my collection together with the inclusion of font and imagery. I extracted this border from the boarder around the text on my roll design which i then slightly edited so it would fit around the text.

Below shows my first step in arranging the text around the imagery. Although being happy with this as a first step the monsters were to big in scale, distracting from the text. I want this design to stand out because of the text and i feel because the imagery is bigger than the font it distracts from the message on the card.

Below shows my next step in my developments where i have made the monsters slightly smaller and re arranged the text. Overall i feel these monsters are a more appropriate size; however, they cover a vast amount of the card not leaving much room for the text.

As the boarder around the text is so obscure i tried arranging the words in different positions to see where they would fit in best. Out of the arrangement of this text and the one above i feel this to be the weaker one as the words seem to be written right to left. Although this may be a more creative way that could appeal to my young demographic because of the amount of visual stimulus on this card it is not easy to read.

On this third experiment i made the monsters slightly bigger again which helped to allow more room for the text. I feel this is the best balance i have had yet between the scale of imagery and the amount of it as there is now a larger negative space to add text.

Once again i tried to rearrange the text to find a more appropriate position for it. Although the words are in a linear fashion and not backwards like previously i feel this is still too confusing to read. From here i will refer to the position of the text on my first experiment and slightly re arrange it so it is in a more appropriate position.

Below shows the outcome for my second card. Overall i feel it does work; however, will need improvements following the formative assessment. I would like to use most of the imagery that is from my gift roll design; however, edit some areas so there is more room for text. As well as this, i would also like to ensure either the monsters are clear on the design with its whole face showing or not at all. I feel this will make the card look overall more professional and interesting to my target market.

For this card i have decided to add a red interior and text at a smaller scale than my previous card. I selected red as this colour is prominent on the exterior of my card so feel they will match up well. As the text on my previous card was slightly too big i have decided to make it a touch smaller and condense it onto one line so it does not take up so much space. I am a lot happier with the scale of this text than in my previous card. Once again the envelope for this card will be of a flat hue and the same as the interior of the card. I feel this is a really good way of uniting both the envelope and card at a low cost.

I mentioned in a previous post i wanted to change the text of my current roll design to my monster font. With lots to do i was concerned this would not get done before the formative deadline; however, by prioritising work and managing my time better i have been able to. One of the reasons i wanted to experiment with this font on my roll design was that Sian felt my text and monsters were too distant from each other.

To add the text to this design i used a combination of both photoshop and illustrator. As my previous font had a white outline i decided to reflect this in my monster font as i found this helped the text to stand out against its busy background. Although it does help the monster font to stand out i am now wondering if a black outline would have been better as the font does stand out because of its new bolder colours. For the formative assessment i will submit this design as there are still other aspects of my project i want to complete.

Overall i feel this font does help to unite the illustrations and text as now everything directly reflects monsters. Despite this, i am unsure of whether this design is now too busy; however, will ask for Matts feedback on this. Within the formative assessment i will present both my original design and this one with the new font to see Matts opinions.

For my first mock up for the formative assessment i decided to make a card. This design was originally one i had created for my sheet wrap; however, i felt it better suited my card design. To create the mock up i took a sheet from my sketchbook which i then folded in half before printing out my designs onto normal printing paper and sticking them on.

Originally, i was going to create my cards 5×7 inches; however, after initially printing the card this was not as big as i thought it would be so decided to change it to 7x 9 inches. Cards for children are often larger than those for adults so i wanted to ensure the scale represented my market area. When deciding i wanted to make my card bigger i looked at online for standard sizes; however, there was a complete variety of almost every size you can think of. Following the formative assessment i will make a trip to town to measure the card sizes within the low end market, to ensure mine fits into a standard size. By ensuring my card is a standard size it should mean it is cheeper to produce so can retail for a low price.

To make my design appeal more to younger boys i decided to add a curved edge to the top of the card. Often with children’s cards the shape is not necessarily rectangular and have a more interesting borders on the top and/ or side of the card. As of yet i have not considered borders within any of my designs apart from the gift sheet so this was a good way of bringing a border design into another product. Overall i feel my cutting could have been more professional along the top of the card. As i used fairly blunt scissors it does not have a crisp edge and it did not help that i was trying to cut through two pieces of card and 3 of paper all at once. When creating this card for the summative assessment i will outsource this cutting to a professional company who can achieve a crisper finish.

As well as considering the design on the front of my card i also wanted to consider what would be inside the card. Often with cards right across the market there is text and/ or colour inside. As my card is for birthdays i added the words happy birthday to the inside of the card in my monster font. I feel this is a nice addition and shows i have considered both the exterior and interior. To ensure the text was the right size i done a few experiments to ensure the text would be big enough to read; however, small enough to allow space for a message in the card. Overall despite the text i settled on seeming to be the right scale i still feel it is slightly too big for the interior of the card as it takes up too much space. To ensure i am managing my time well i will leave this text as is so i can ensure i have all my mock ups made in time for the assessment and then review it following this date.

As well as adding text to the inside of my card i also decided to add a flat hue of colour. As my design is for children i feel this will be more attractive to them than a flat white background. For this background i settled on an orange hue as this tone is on the front of my card and contrasts nicely against the black background on the cards front. I feel the orange and black combination will really appeal to my boys market. Overall i really like this addition as it really brightens the cards tone overall. Wanting to manage my time wisely i decided not to add colour to the inside of the happy birthday text; however, this is something i did concider. I feel if i did add colour to the inside of my text it would have made it stand out more and also appeal more to my target market.

When considering the envelope that would go with this card i would have it the same flat hue as on the inside of the card. This would mean the card and envelope match and it would also allow the envelope to be produced at a low price as it will not require any printing.

Overall i am happy with the outcome of this card except from the few points mentioned above. I feel the thing which most annoys me about this card is the size of the text on the inside and the thing i enjoy most is the orange background on the interior of the card. From here i will prioritise digital mock ups of my products so far to ensure i have this element for the formative assessment point.

After my first attempts at designing my sheet i decided to take it in a different direction using text instead of imagery, inspired by my birthday cards. For these designs i created them on a 50x 70cm template as this is the standard size in shops. Although this did mean i could accurately tell the size and spacing of my designs it did mean the file size was rather large, which made illustrator run exceptionally slowly.

First i experimented with a linear structure. Overall i really like how the hues within each letter create striped lines of colour across the sheet. Despite this there is the concern that once the present is wrapped the words happy birthday will not be clear and only feature part of the text. I decided to create my sheet wrap vertically as all those i saw in my market research are in a vertical direction, most proably so they can be displayed clearly.

As i have used every hue from my colour pallet within the text i decided to use a black background. Despite making the overall design appear awfully dark it really helps the colour to pop out the page. I have experimented with a white background within one of my designs; however, i feel the black does make more of an impact. If i have time before the formative assessment i would like to experiment with the letters having a white outline instead of black. I believe this will make them stand out from the page and create a bigger contrast particularly between the purple and black. Hopefully i will have time to do this before the formative assessment; however, i want to get at least one design for each product finished first.

At this stage i decided to print off the design to scale to see how big the letters were. Unfortunately, i can only print onto A4 at home; however, by keeping the design to scale i can still get an idea of how big each row/ letter will be. Once analysing this i decided to make the text only slightly bigger. This is just so i know the letters will really stand out against the background.

For my next experiment i decided to create a diagonal repeat. Overall i feel this does make the design look more interesting; however, i do miss the linear stripes of colour within my first design. I feel this style of repeat looks a lot more detailed because of the slight movement between each line; however, is still structured in its formation. From here i want to try a back and forth method to see if i can create a balance between an interesting repeat and having the hues in a more linear fashion rather than diagonal across the page.

For my third composition i experimented with this back and forth layout. To do this i created two lines which were slightly offset against each other and then repeated them down the page. Overall this is my favourite design and most likely the one i will be submit for the formative assessment.

As this is my favourite design so far i have also chosen to display it in white. Overall against the white background the colours do stand out a lot more with the help of the black outline. Despite this, i do feel white is slightly boring for my demographic. This experiment has made me realise i do need to experiment with a white outline against the black background to see if it really does help the letters to stand out. Once i have experimented with this i will make an informed decision to whether the black or white background will be best at this assessment point.

As all my designs have been so linear up to this point i decided to experiment with a more sporadic layout which only features the words happy birthday once. Overall i really like this design as it has a much more fun layout; however, is most probably not appropriate for a gift sheet. As the text is only on the design once and at such a large scale when wrapping the gift only certain letters may be featured so the overall statement will not be clear.

Although this design is not appropriate for my gift sheet i think it would make a great birthday card so will use it for this product instead. As the birthday card will not be wrapped about anything and the whole page be visible all together this design is a lot more appropriate for this product. Following the formative assessment point i want to be more experimental with the positioning of each letter within my first 3 designs to make it seem more interesting for my target market. I want to be able to combine this more fun layout with still easily readable text so the message is clear.

Following my tutorial with Matt i have selected a design that he liked and started to develop it into a repeat pattern. Instead of just taking the first illustration i did i decided to redraw it, taking inspiration from all the illustrations throughout my sketchbook.

To start i selected a 0.2, 0.5 and 0.8 weighted pens to give myself a range of line thickness. After creating the first section of the repeat i reflected on this and realise there was no obvious difference between the 0.2 and 0.5 so decided to just use the 0.2 and 0.8. I have used the thicker pen for the outlines, eyes and the outline of the mouths to highlight them. Then i used the 0.2 for finer details such as textures and teeth. I feel this nicely varies certain aspects.

Once happy with my design i scanned it into illustrator and image traced it. However, because some of the details were so fine no matter how much i played with the threshold in image trace they were not apparent on screen. To combat this i brought the original design into Photoshop and played with the brightness, exposure and contrast to make the lines bolder before bringing the design back into illustrator.

Once happy with the image tracing result i recieved i started playing around with positioning the design so i could fill in the gaps to make it repeat. First of all i went for a brick repeat and then started filling in the gaps with my wacom tablet and the pen tool on illustrator. Unfortunately because of how much illustrator tends to smooth out the lines i struggled creating the same style in a digital format. Although you can go back though and edit the points along each line with the direct selection tool, i still feel the digital and hand drawn elements did not match up.

After knowing creating the same style was going to be a lot harder than i first thought i decided to experiment with a range of other repeats which would minimise the gap between each motif, in the hope that as i have less space to fill the more time i can spend editing each line to ensure it matched up.

For the design bellow i still went for a brick repeat, however; moved the motifs slightly off centre to see if this would help and also flipped the design vertically. Although this did minimise the gaps I wanted to carry on experimenting as felt i could do better. The benefit with reflecting the design however, is that the happy birthday text has now been flipped upside down which makes the wrapping paper more versatile providing more ways to wrap the present without it seeming upside down.

I then went on and simply tried to rotate the design at odd angles; however, still so the text would be upsidown. Although i feel like i am reaching my target a lot better i still feel dramatic improvements can be made.

Liking the rotational aspect i then tried it around a single central point. Once again although thinking this has a lot less negative space for myself to fill in there is still too much.

From here i will go back to this design and redraw it so it fits nicely into a more even square. By doing this it will give me less space to fill once bring it into a digital format. As well as this i would like to make the happy birthday text bigger as i do not feel it stands out enough compared to the rest of the design. Once i am happy with the repeat of the design i will then start to add colour.