Kingswood Nursery and Infant Centre - Character Commission Research

The Kingswood Centre, a residential environmental resource for young children located near Wolverhampton, would like to promote itself and develop its environment through the use of a sympathetic child oriented character.
I was initially commissioned to design and build a new website for the centre but during informal discussions with the client I suggested that the development of a character might be a possible strategy for not only developing web presence but also a means to a unified child-centred identity that could incorporate printed communications, signage etc.


Aims

• to design and develop a character or characters that promote the centre in the eyes of its young target audience
• to develop a character that offers a sense of identity and security to young children, that can be used in a variety of media and formats, and develops the centre's overall brand identity

The centre is closely associated with rabbits, both wild and tame, and an initial idea is to explore the potential for a rabbit as a character. This is an initial trawl through existing characters of varying quality and suitability.

Portfolio Feedback - Springetts

Creative Director, Roger Bannister, gave me an hour of his time to go through my portfolio as it stands.
Roger made many comments about portfolios generally, often, then, relating them directly to my own. He started by saying that he personally liked portfolios that held great variety and that to his mind a portfolio should ebb and flow. His view is that many students assemble a portfolio from 'off the shelf pieces' completed at various points in the past with very little attention being paid to the depth of variety, right down to fonts and colour schemes being presented. His message was to consider the whole and avoid repetition of styles, genres and details which indicate a 'one trick pony'.
He was of the opinion that mine avoided this pitfall.
Roger's second piece of advice was to treat portfolio creation as a 'tick box' exercise, after all this is what busy creative directors will inevitably do. As far as my own went he said that it ticked the boxes for use of illustration, typography, ability to conceptualise and use of layout.
He suggested that a short statement to accompany each piece, to place it in context, would be useful. In the absence of the creator there is nothing else to provide this information, it sells the piece without you being there. Include, what the brief was, your thinking and what you actually did.
To Roger's mind my portfolio is varied but appears to be driven by illustration. In terms of Springetts his concern might be that I would become frustrated by the nature of their work. Much of it is tweaking or in a sense 're-creative' and there is a possibility that it would not offer sufficient creative outlet for me. He felt that my work might be more ideally suited to editorial layout.
Roger declared my work 'nice' but gave a number of suggestions for adding further dimensions to it.He talked about some focused self-initiated work demonstrating the ability to tweak existing designs that I might feel don't fully work for one reason or another. Packaging or identities would be ideal subject matter but the caveat is be absolutely sure that the existing design is not working as well as it might.

Another idea was to offer two solutions to a brief; one that is safer, more conventional and the other more conceptual and challenging.

Furthermore he suggested looking at social/cultural shifts that are impacting on products or services e.g. the move away from dinner parties affecting the sale of after dinner mints, and seek design solutions to bolster business; in this instance a more informal mint Springles product.

Roger finished by saying that it was only wise to tailor a portfolio to a specific job market if you are really sure and interested in working in that sector. Otherwise be true to yourself, submitting a portfolio is as much about finding out whether you would want to work for them too.

Christmas Card Mood Board

Peskimo

Laura Ljungkvist

Paperchase

Charitycards.co.uk

Springetts Work Placement Review

Looking back over my two weeks at Springetts a number of things strike me.

I have no doubts about my organisational skills, punctuality and the ability to carry out routine tasks. I'm able to muck in and don't consider any activities to be beneath me. I obviously learnt a bit about the business and the way it operates, I brushed up on a few Mac/application skills and got to use exotic equipment like the Xyron machine.

However, there were times during the placement where I could certainly have been a little more proactive in terms of eliciting work and advice from those around me. Although I believe that I have an ability to relate to and get along with a diverse range of people, in some situations I can become more reserved. Perhaps there were times when my personality didn't shine through because of this and I was happy for it to be so because, after all, I was only there for two weeks, everyone was busy, and what did it matter. But I can't really afford to think like that. I can't be sure what each opportunity might lead and employers/clients are more likely to engage someone who adds a little bit of spark to the proceedings. Therefore I need to 'be myself', sell me and relax a bit more. I can certainly see how a longer four week placement, as first suggested, would help here. I also think that the layout of the studio work space did not help in this respect; computer towers and screens being arranged in such a way that it did not allow face to face contact.

I need to push myself to organise a variety of such placements because they do offer an insight into whether it's a suitable working environment for you personally. At the moment I'm not entirely sure of the direction that I see my career developing. Further varied experience of this type might help me to crystalize thoughts.

I could see myself working within and enjoying the general environment at Springetts but I'm not so sure about a daily diet of branding. It would be good to experience life in a smaller more diverse studio where the daily, or at least week to week fare, is a little more varied.

Considering my design work as a whole, I have been happiest where I have largely been in overall control and where I am engaged in more illustrative decorative tasks e.g. the Sanna Annukka, Penguin, and Christmas card briefs.

Springetts - Day Nine

Most of the day worked on the Roots and Wings brief. Developed the central figure to offer a variety of arm positions, although the original, with arms hidden behind her back, works well with the floral shield design. I wish I had the time and nerve to develop more radical designs of my own. I'm quite pleased with the results so far but can't help feeling that my heart and soul has not really been in the development of this one. It's not what I would choose to do.

Had a phone call from Zoe mid-afternoon to request help with the making of more Bendicks mock-ups. Not sure what had happened but all of a sudden she had half an hour before the courier was due to collect and there were still eight packages to make up. It was all hands to the pump making up the new style sachet packets. Sam, one of the junior designers, offered me a hand - it was good to feel the network of support extending to myself.

Roger had agreed to review and offer feedback on my portfolio and finally, after a lengthy meeting with clients, he was available to get down to it.

Springetts - Day Eight

Helped Zoe out by making mock-ups of the new Bendicks Mints boxes. Used the Xyron machine to create stickers of the coloured nets necessary to cover the bottoms of the original boxes. Eight boxes in four different colour ways.

The tops had been professionally printed by a repro company. I cut these out and scored them before passing them back to Zoe so that she could apply specially created silver decals to the surfaces.

Roger reviewed where I had got to on the Roots and Wings brief. He suggested developing the line quality of the drawing so that it was in greater sympathy with the overall design which has a broken and unfinished feel to it, enhanced further by the Dominican font. Jai helped me to formulate a way forward on this, suggesting that I search through the artistic brushes available in Illustrator rather than utilising effects or filters which could lead to future difficulties with pixelation.

Roger also encouraged me to apply my line drawing to a second of the designs, a shield with swirling foliage embelishment. These are good suggestions in that they create a definite workload for my final day tomorrow.

Springetts - Day Six & Seven

Day Six

Carried on working on the 'Roots & Wings' project but switched my attention to designs featuring a full length figure.  After working up several roughs I used the afternoon to trace out, what Julian and I considered the most promising, in Illustrator.

Once again my comparatively poor computer skills made this a slow process. However, I did feel that I had really got to grips with the pen tool and bezier curves by the end of the afternoon but I am still finding it very difficult to assess how to set about achieving a required or desired effect.

Day Seven

Roger reviewed progress so far and declared that what I had worked on till now was, "quite nice". He suggested experimenting with different treatments from the Effects menu in an attempt to achieve the kind of 'distressed old print' look that we are after. I spent the morning finishing the facial features and experimenting in this way and attempting to place my design into the image of the packaging. This demonstrated to me that the design works in the roundel format but inserting the design proved problematic in terms of its quality; once rasterized to achieve an approximation of the desired effect it then became horribly pixelated when attempting to utilise it against the packaging. I don't understand enough about the software and the way it behaves to overcome these difficulties by myself.

Late in the afternoon, at Julian's suggestion, I developed the wings of the figure a little more and also gave her arms, hitherto these had been tucked behind her. These represent small but significant and satisfying improvements.

Sandwiched in between I went shoping for Zoe in preparation for mocking-up some Bendick's boxes tomorrow. So it was another trip to Waitrose and Selfridges to spend £40 plus on chocolate mints. Not a bad way to spend an afternoon.