Final Version

After much agonising and tweaking I've finally come up with my final version. Logo's definitely aren't my strong point, a fact which wasn't helped at all by the difficulty of the brief and the short time we had available to come up with our concepts.

I wouldn't say I'm 100% happy with it as it doesn't really tell us that it's representing a food company and after I printed it out I realised that the colours didn't come out like they looked on screen. Te purple came out a lot darker and the yellow was much too bright, I'll definitely have to add some other colour to it, 100% wasn't a good idea. Rookie error.

Comparison

I'm trying to decide between these two typefaces. My criteria is for a simple san-serif typeface that will look good at full size but also be easily readable at small sizes.

The top one is Raavi, I really like the letterforms of the S and the E and the weight matches the logo well I think. The bottom one is Segoe UI. I'm not really the greatest fan of the S, I wish it would curve down a little bit more but the light weight makes it nice and easy to read.

Both of these options have their pros and cons but think I am leaning toward Segoe UI as readability is pretty high up on the marking criteria and it seems to be more easily read when reduced to 15% of its original size.

Works in Progress

Royal Bluebell

Here's some initial concepts using the Royal Bluebell as inspiration.

Floral Emblems of Australia

I've been doing a bit of research on Australian floral emblems and we have quite a few interesting and beautiful ones representing different states.

NSW: 

SA:

Sturt's Desert Pea

WA:

Red and Green Kangaroo Paw

NT:

Sturt's Desert Rose

QLD:

Cooktown Orchid

TAS:

Bluegum

ACT:

Royal Bluebell

I was originally thinking of using the Waratah but I really like the looks of the Royal Bluebell. The five pointed flower really appeals to me and I think it has potential.

The fact that it's my home state's floral emblem doesn't hurt at all either :-)

Moodboards

Last week I created a couple of moodboards that displayed some of the themes I want in my design.

The first one is the bee, to me the bee is the ultimate symbol of sustainable living, they are at one with nature and live in a state of mutualism with their environment which means that they depend on the plants they feed on as much as the plants depend on them to survive. It would be great if humans could coexist with nature in this way.

I really like the look of the honeycomb too, there's just something about the hexagon shapes that's appealing to me. I might try to explore that further when it comes to the packaging design later.

The other theme I wanted to explore was of the sustenance provided by a mother to her child. After reading the brief, one of the first things I imagined was a mother cradling and nurturing her child. I tried to capture what I was thinking of with this moodboard but I think it would be much too difficult to portray breastfeeding in a way that's suitable for family friendly packaging without doing it in a really abstract, stylized way, and i just don't have the artistic skills to pull that off.

Back to the Drawing board.

First Attempts

Coming up with good logo concepts is proving to be heaps harder than I anticipated. I always knew I was going to find this unit pretty hard as I don't think that logo's are really my thing, but trying to come up with something that represents healthy food, environmental responsibility and an Australian identity is a bit of a nightmare really. It's really hard not to fall into using cliches, especially when trying to make it look Australian. As tempting as it may be to use a Kangaroo, Southern Cross or Australian flag in my design, there is no way I'm going to resort to that. Nope.

I played with the idea of gumnuts for a while and was pretty stoked with how they looked at first but then when I came back the next day I thought they looked like rubbish. Probably a very obvious solution too.

Some early mockups of sketches I had done. I wanted to do something with Wattle at first  then switched to gumnuts.

Playing with my nuts

Australian Logo Exercise

The Bundaberg Brewed Drinks logo uses an image of the rising sun, a symbol which is often associated with the Australian outback. The logo features black text set over fading shades of red ochre. Red ochre is a very common colour and can be seen in most of the inland areas of the continent due to the harsh sun and low rainfall. This is why Australia is often referred to as The Sunburnt Country.
By using red ochre in their logo, Bundaberg drinks are associating themselves with outback australia, the way the colour starts out more saturated in the foreground, then becomes washed out and pale as it moves towards the background makes us think of the sun beating down and almost makes us want to go out in search of a nice, cold, refreshing drink.
The main text is set in a very elegent looking serif font with embellishments on the B and G giving it a very traditional feel. The sub text set on a red banner serves to reinforce this feeling of tradition. The logo makes us feel that this is the traditional drink of Australians and that for generations we have been reaching for bottles of Bundaberg brew to quench our thirst and revive us after spending time out in the hot sun.
This is actually quite true, Bundaberg drinks has been in business making tasty beverages since 1960.

Pantone Colour Exercise

The purpose of this excercise was to create a colour palette using the Australian landscape as inspiration. We were to create the palette first as a process colour (CMYK) then convert that to a Pantone colour using a Pantone swatch book as reference.
The real aim of this was to show the difference between what we see on screen and what it would really look like printed out. The difference was actually very pronounced and showed us what a valuable (and expensive) tool the Pantone swatch book is. By comparing the swatch book to the same Pantone swatch on screen it's easy to see how large the difference can be and that it would often be neccessary to choose a different swatch from the book to ensure that colours printed accurately.
Unfortunately I can't afford a Pantone swatch book right now so this exercise for me was really more about seeing the differences between a process colour swatch and that same colour when it is converted to the nearest available Pantone colour.

Week 1 Activities

This activity shows the interesting abstract shapes that can be created by merely resizing and rotating copies of an existing image. It was quite a fun way to get back into the swing of things after the long Christmas break and was good for dusting off the cobwebs.

Identity Systems Assessments Brief

Brief: Sustenance

Sustenance is a food company and one of its lines provide delicious, nutritious and locally sourced children’s lunchpacks. A recent study of Australian children’s school lunches found that most children brought home a packaged lunch box, children consumed up to four highly processed ‘junk foods’ each day and almost all lunch boxes included bread and fruit, but also contained biscuits unhealthy muesli/fruit bars and packaged snacks (www.pgprogram.com.au).

Time poor and culinary challenged Australian parents complain that they don’t have the time or knowledge tosource and create the healthy lunches that their children need to provide them with the most optimum sustenance. Also, competing supermarket brands often tout healthy Children’s snacks that are anything but. This was recently discovered in the recent Sanatarium debacle, when Sanitarium described a dubious percentage of fruit contenton their packaging for a product which included higher amounts of other substances such as sugars and gellingagents (www.ausfoodnews.com.au).

That’s where Sustenance comes into play. Sustenance takes the guess work out of children’s lunches by providing a range of packaged meals that are healthy, locally sourced, and free from preservatives and gels. Sustenance is backed by a team of paediatricians and nutritionist who provide us with the latest research on Children’s well-being and health.

Sustenance has a range of speciality meals that offer variety and options for dairy, wheat and nut allergies as well as gluten-free options. Our wide variety of meals allow for your child to have variety and assures that they will never come home with a full packed lunch box!

Our products are all locally sourced, all items are grown, sourced and produced in Australia. We support the Australian economy and aim to provide the Australian public with healthy and environmentally sustainable goods.

Sustenance represents a true Australian outlook and only supports suppliers that promote Australian grown and made, and those Australian owned companies that operate in a highly ethical manner. All of our profits remain here, and by giving healthy lunch solutions to families at reasonable prices, we will help sustain the future of our country.

Your brief is to create a branding system for the client which includes a logo, style guide, and packaging design. The logo should reflect the company’s environmentally sound, parent and child friendly, and Australian outlook. The company is looking for a design that reflects high-end organic and sustainable food brand. A packaging design for the company’s ‘lunch box’ series sub-brand name “Vittles” will be created using sustainable materials and innovative techniques.

Change of scenery

I'm very new to blogging but I've been having a bit of a play around on Tumblr for a few days before I created this one and it was starting to make me very angry. For some reason, everytime I created a post it would show the post title but none of my body copy would show up. The first couple of times it happened I thought it must have been user error and I somehow didn't click the 'publish' button properly, but after three successful postings out of about fifteen attempts I have come to the conclusion that Tumblr actually really sucks and I don't ever want to use it again.

Let's hope that Blogger isn't as buggy and I can actually create some posts without my head exploding due to pent up rage when I have to recreate my post for the thrid time because it's somehow managed to disappear but not actually post on my blog after I hit publish.

If this post is successful I will transfer the few posts I did manage to create on Tumblr over to here and use this instead.

Fingers crossed.......

Testing Testing

Hello, is this thing on?.....