Opportunities

Every project gives you opportunities to create but also constraints to work to. Use this hand out to consider the opportunities this project has to help you improve your skills, knowledge and creativity.

OpportunitiesWhat creative opportunities can you see in this project? How could you challenge yourself creatively in this project? You can refer to your previous experience here.In this project I believe that there will be a lot of opportunities to create a consistent and visually pleasing theme and style to be used in both the packaging and advertising for my energy drink. I would like to push myself to produce a creative theme that not only catches the eyes of the consumer but also ties in with the name and intended audience. To do this, I would like to move beyond using a combination of fancy fonts and default shapes, as well as avoiding a direct copy of an existing drink’s style. This is what I did in the previous recipe card project, where after determining that my first style and layout was not up to scratch with my partner’s work, I decided to scrap it and build and entirely new template. This decision meant that our cards had a very pleasing and uniform style and also awarded with top marks for our efforts.

What technical opportunities for development are available in this project? What technical challenges could you set yourself? You can refer to your previous experience here.In a technical sense, primarily I would like to move beyond the use of simple tools and begin to use more advanced techniques in order to create my branding. In the past I haven’t really strayed out of my comfort zone and have stuck with simple tools such as the ellipse/shape tool and multiple blending and colour options. In this project I would personally like to move beyond that, utilizing different styles and techniques to create something that looks a bit out of the ordinary. A previous example of this would have to be my unit 1 text task, which was originally just some text on a background. Following constructive feedback I redid this task using several different morphing and text tools, which earned me a higher mark and bumped my overall grade up to a distinction.

How could the skills you are using and developing here be useful in a professional context? Consider the requirements for different job roles.

In a professional situation, skills such as graphic design and independent thinking would be highly useful in an area such as advertising and publishing. People who work in this industry often have to create such branding and themes from scratch and follow a long process of experimenting and comparing to achieve the optimal result. A creative and free thinking mind aids this process and as such I would like to aim for an independent approach in this project, coming up with my own style and brand and developing them with comparisons to other existing products. In an advertising job it would be helpful to have persuasion skills that can be incorporated into ads and styles that persuade the customer to purchase that particular product. Use of techniques like factors of power is something I will be using and improving in this project in order to ensure that my product will sell to a fictional audience.

What opportunities for designing for different media does this project give you? Which final product type interests you the most and why?

This project offers several different opportunities to create media, such as an advert, banners, billboards and the design of the can itself. These will all most likely follow a common theme and set of colours in order to retain the brand’s identity and style. The type I am most looking forward to designing is both the branding and the billboard as these both give a large amount of creative freedom to develop and display my creation. The billboard in particular is very in

your face and has a lot of space to work with, while the can design will allow me to play with all the official stuff (nutrition facts and contact info) as well as the logo and motifs.