Choosing a Brief — YCN and Gallery 1988.

With the very compelling and long list of external briefs given to us for the module — Identifying Direction, I have decided on aiming to complete three of the briefs.

YCN — Pact Coffee.

Planning to collaborate on this lighthearted and niche brief with some peer friends, Pact Coffee is a coffee brand that has small cafe’s as well as delivering coffee to people’s homes. Pact Coffee prides itself on it’s relationships with their farmers who supply them with the coffee beans. The brief requires us to refresh the branding, producing a main piece or a series’ of pieces, as well as designing products for the POS (point of sale), this would mean designs within the cafe, such as coffee cups, mugs, aprons, prints, tote bags etc. They had also highlighted that they’d like for a focus to be on the stories of their farmers.

When meeting up with my collaborators, we ran through the brief thoroughly and discussed our initial ideas towards it. We had all really liked the current branding for Pact Coffee to begin with, from the logo design, textures, colour-scheme to fonts — this made it difficult to come up with original and unique ideas since the branding was great to begin with, but we were all really keen to work on it nevertheless.

At a later date, we regrouped after having done some individual research and begun to discuss ideas for the design direction of the brand. The decisions that came out of this were, we were to implement the images they had given to us in the brief pact, though, quite a few of the images were not captured well and didn’t do much justice to the farms and farmers or cafes etc. so to tackle this, we thought it’d be best to go for a duotone approach in the given colour palette, with an applied texture above it, either halftone or the logo fingerprint overlaid. We will be using the images of the farms and the farmers to visualise their stories in the format of a booklet that will be within the cafes, as well as well-sized cards that come with every specific flavour of coffee bean bags (that are delivered home), to make the customers purchases feel more personal and be aware of where their beloved coffee comes from. The same idea but in a digital format, we will create snappy Instagram posts in the same identity.

We also discussed the probability of adding a few illustrations as part of the branding visuals, so these could be used as patterns or to complement the existing images — the look and feel of these would complement Pact Coffee in the sense that they attract both corporate people but also casual lovers of coffee, so it is important to have an enjoyable yet still sophisticated and modern identity.

Then these illustrations and patterns could also be applied to the POS products and designs within the cafe — we are also considering very simple typography to be used in Instagram posts and on the POS products, using the brands colour scheme.

Gallery 1899 — Crazy4Cult.

Another snappy, fun and jovial brief, Galley 1988 wants us to create an art piece in any medium within the size guidelines (to be shipped to America). Out of a long list of movies playing with the theme of ‘cult’, we are to choose one of the movies and create something in response to it. I had chosen this as firstly, it didn’t feel like a brief but rather a carefree and simply fun opportunity to design something, despite it being a competition. I thought it’d be nice to participate in something like this to take a break from the stresses of fulfilling other briefs as well as completing the other elements of this module. The winners will be exhibited in a Gallery in America.

I had decided on the movie…

In addition to achieving the two briefs and documenting the processes and entire journey in a final RVJ, I will be actively producing personal work to go on my personal creative Instagram account and adding to/organising both my online and digital portfolio. As well as this, I will be looking into and applying to creative opportunities such as lessons, internships etc. In terms of academic writing, I will be fulfilling the essay on reflection of this module.