During the summer following my first year of my course, I took on a few small, personal projects. My reasoning for this was to ensure that I continued to build upon my design skills that I developed over the year. This allowed e to continue my growth, as well as ensuring that my design skills don’t go ‘rusty’ as expected if I took a 5 month break from design completely.
I found an incredibly useful account on Instagram called ‘Designer Briefs’ when I was searching for a project brief to play around with. This account posts weekly design challenges, including a brand name, business type, deliverables, client description and values. I found it very interesting to browse this account, both to see a variety of briefs to work with, as well as seeing other designers outcomes. I truly think that even investigating the different ways that people approached the same project will help ,e in future projects to become more open minded and experimental in my approaches, as the various outcomes in formats and styles I would have never even considered continuously impress me when I see them posted at the end of each week.
delics packaging and branding
Colour
I wanted to create a ‘naturalistic’ feel for NoCaffs branding, aligning with the easy-going and calm values by creating something welcoming and ‘chilled’. I decided on going with browns and beige as my colour palette, as these are both seen as quite earthy, calm colours, as well as aligning with the typical image of coffee. I also went with a caramel shade and incorporated this into the colour palette ,for a vibrant pop of colour while sticking to the ‘coffee’ feel.
Typograpgy
I found typography gave be quite a ‘design block’ for this project. Initially, I feel that I let the value of ‘modern’ define me into a traditional box, as I was only looking at quite blocky, sans-serif fonts. However, after she experimentation, I decided that I can incorporate modernity into NoCaff’s brand in other ways, and that sans-serif and more traditional fonts can be perfectly acceptable and strong in a modern brand image. I decided on the following:
Logo
The logo is the aspect of this project that I am most proud of. Initially, I overcomplicated it, trying to create something unique and complex, heavily inspired by more maximalist designs such as the Starbucks logo. However, I ended up comnpletleyt changing my approach after much experimentation, as a lot of my designs were turning out quite tacky and therefore looking dated as apposed to modern. I created a simple coffee bean design and applied a print effect- I didn’t intend this to become the main part of my logo, however I ended up loving how it looked and felt that it really tied into the natural vibe.
One of the listed outcomes was packaging. I decided to create a few mockups of products using my established branding to create these. I went with two product types that I felt were best suited for the brand- coffee beans and a chilled coffee product. I am happy with the outcome of these and feel that they successfully reflect the brand image I created. It was quite fun to create a proc like this, and it isn’t something that I tackled in any of my year one projects. I