These three pages above are my summer work research where i looked at three different places where giftware is sold- i chose one big corporation, a smaller business and a pop up event. This was a very good introduction to the project because it helped me to understand different ways giftware is sold and advertised, and what is popular at different times in the year. When writing about each case study, i made sure to think about a few different factors including the mood of the shop/event, colour trends, product, place,price, customer profile and a few more things - i also realised that these were things that i had to think about throughout my whole project.
My initial research - i started to think about what i found when doing my summer project, and wrote down a few random words that came to mind when looking back at my research, then, from this, i started to look into what specific words meant. For example, i had to specifically know the meaning of branding because i knew that i was going to base my whole project around a theme to make it my own and make sure its branded as my own. This research really helped me get a better understanding of what a few key terms meant.
On these three pages above, I had started to research a little more into giftware, specifically companies/ websites that specifically sell giftware products. Doing this research really helped me to learn what gifts are popular and current trends, as I wanted my project to be appealing to my audience and something they will definitely like. I chose to look closer at three websites that sold completely different products, because there is a wide range of giftware items and I had to explore them all, so first i looked at Etsy. Etsy is a very versatile site where a lot of different products are sold, so i chose to look at the most popular section - this taught me what kind of styles are popular and helped me to start to come up with some ideas already based on what was selling the best. Scribbler.com is also a popular website with a huge range of different gifts, however mostly selling greeting cards. As a greeting card was one of my final outcomes, i knew i had to look at different styles of them to figure out what looked best and what was most popular, and also what designs they had along with the typography on them. I learnt from this research that the funnier and “rude humour” cards were bestselling.
This is a simple moodboard of images that I put together that I liked of cute little giftware style gifts. Moodboards really help you to visualise your ideas, looking at colour palettes and patterns, and how things contrast together.
These were a few of the pages that I really enjoyed doing, using different techniques to create observational drawings. On this day, I had brought in one of my jelly cats to draw since I researched them yesterday and I had a few good ideas about what I wanted to do with my project - so I did a few observational drawings based on my jelly cat. The first one being a tonal drawing - I liked how this one turned out however I had to trust the process because I was struggling to get the proportions right however I figured out what was going wrong and solved it, but I do love how it turned out and it gave me a good starting point to my designs. Since the tonal drawing was pretty complex, I made the negative space drawing pretty simple and just did an outline of the elephant. For my continuous line drawings, i only did the head of the elephant as i thought it would be more simple but effective and i love how it turned out!! It looked like a logo that a famous company would use, so i thought i would use that for my repeated pattern, however, i had to refine the continuous line drawing.
These are my three designs, which i have simplified further and further. Simplifying and refining my work was very important as it meant I could make sure I have everything right and have the design exactly how i want it to be, and I knew that I had to simplify my designs to make them look less messy and more sleek/ simplistic, however my final version looked a bit boring and I didn’t really like it so I chose my second one to use as my design for my repeated pattern. The second one was pretty simple and effective, but not too simple and still had character to it.
I researched pattern artists and looked closer at some of their repeated patterns to help me come up with more ideas on what i wanted to do for my repeated pattern design. At this point, i knew i wanted to stick with the current theme of animals/ the elephant that i had done for my observational drawings, however wasn’t sure on how to lay it out. I chose four artists that I really liked the style of, and i enjoyed researching them and learning about the techniques they used as it gave me inspiration on what I could do to make gift wrap. I also made two collages of some of their pieces of work because it helped me to visualise my ideas better and look closer at the colour schemes they used throughout their work, helping me see what colours contrast well together and what would work in my project.
This is my first digital repeated pattern which I made on photoshop with different tools and techniques. I loved learning new things digitally because it means for my next project I can use them and make my project unique, and it just gives me some more understanding on the types of things you can create on photoshop. The design I used for this pattern was one of my continuous line drawings, as I thought it would be perfect for a pattern, so I scanned it into my computer, put it into photoshop and started playing around with different ways I could lay out the pattern. However, thing I would change about this or do differently next time is that some of the elephants don’t look even and are slightly out of place, so next time I would definitely go back and check over to make sure it’s correct and exactly how I want it to be.
This was my first attempt at creating a repeating pattern on paper using a unique cutting and sticking technique that I really enjoyed learning. I think I’m going to probably use this method in some of my other projects as it was easy once I got the hang of it, and it always looks so effective and the outcomes look great once done. These elephants were inspired by my previous observational drawings because I wanted to stick to the theme of jungle animals and keep this theme throughout my project which, looking back, I successfully did, however i maybe should have looked a bit closer into Ripon and linked in some Ripon related things to make it ore specific and person to the people buying my products since they were being sold in Ripon.
This is my digitalised repeated pattern for my gift wrap that i put together using photoshop. To do this, i scanned and uploaded my paper version onto the MacBook and put it into photoshop, before going over it with the pen tool and refining it to create a digital drawing of my design. Then, i duplicated it to put it in a pattern, before duplicating them more and more to create the whole pattern page. To make it not as simple, i drew the leaf pattern and added some small blue hearts to make it look more friendly and childlike. At this point in the project, i had an idea that i was going to aim my products towards a younger audience, so tried to make it to appease a child. I really love this gift wrap design and i wish i actually made it into a gift wrap for one of my final outcomes, however I don’t think I managed my time in the best way so I didn’t really have any time at the end of the project to do this.
When I knew that my audience was going to be children, I created the first page to explain my ideas and what factors I could put into my designs to make sure it fits my audience. I also looked at some greeting cards that fit my audience and wrote about how those have inspired me, and then found a customer profile template on google images that I used to show specifically who my audience is
This is my first card design that I did using photoshop. I used my design for the gift wrap and turned it into a greeting card by adding some typography and extra details like the polka dots and balloon. I hadn’t looked at typography in detail yet during this project, so I chose a pretty basic font however I think it works well as it’s easy to read, especially since it’s aimed at children so they will be able to understand it easily. I chose the blue and grey colour scheme because I think they contrast together really well and the blue background makes the elephant design stand out in the centre of the card.
The first mind map was a group activity where everyone in the class added different themes that would work for our projects, and their feedback on these themes. This was a really helpful activity because I got to see what other people thought of our ideas and what would or wouldn’t work. It helped me to understand what people would like to see in giftware, and what ideas were the most popular throughout the class. After we did this, I gathered all the information and rounded up my ten top themes that I thought would work. Although I already had a good idea on what theme I was going to, I knew I had to explore more ideas and couldn’t rule all other themes out this early on in the project so wrote positives and negatives for each one to narrow them down.
I started to look a bit more into typography, specifically what works on greeting cards so I could improve my first design. I researched different fonts and different parts of typography, thinking about would work well with my designs and it really encouraged me to try find a unique but legible font for my greeting cards. I also experimented with the letter press method, and created two pieces of writing using different typefaces and sizes - I liked learning more about the letter press however I knew I wasn’t going to use this on my final design because it looked a little bit messy and a digital font would’ve fit better.
After researching more about greeting cards, I realised that I should try some different techniques, so I did a linoprint and used this for my final greeting card! I started to come up with some initial ideas, and drew out the different ways I could carve the linoprint out as in the past I had struggled with it, so I prepared and figured out the best way to do it. I came up with two ideas, my original elephant design and a zebra design. The zebra was quite tricky because I had to make sure I carved it in the right sections so that the black ink would only be on the bits I wanted to be black, and the other parts stayed white. I planned how I was going to carve it out, and I think it worked pretty well overall however I had to do a lot of refining on photoshop because I missed out some parts when cutting the linoprint out so it was patchy. I like doing linoprint but it’s a long and messy process so I’m not sure whether I would do this again in other projects.
“All of these all kind of link together as they are exotic/ jungle animals and my favourite is probably the zebra - at first my favourite was the elephant because I wanted to stick to the with the elephant theme but now I’m thinking that the zebra is much cuter and would look better on a card aimed at younger children” Creating this page helped me to explore more ideas for my greeting card and made me realise what animal I wanted to put on it. Also, at this point in the project I knew I wanted to stick to the jungle animal theme throughout.
Group criteria was so important because I got feedback from my classmates and helped me to see what was working well in my project and what I could’ve done better. I took a lot of their advice and it did really improve my designs.
These are my final greeting card designs - I made four different ones as i liked both designs and I like how they all turned out. I think I should’ve cleaned them up a bit better, especially the zebra as it’s a bit messy when you look closely, but overall I like them all. I made these using photoshop, experimenting with different backgrounds, colour schemes and fonts to see what would fit best. I think they fit my audience really well and I’m excited to sell them at Ripon as I think they will be pretty popular with younger people and adults buying for their children or grandchildren!! I am very excited to see these printed out as a final greeting card as I worked hard on researching, developing and refining them.
My theme of animals was very popular amongst hanging decorations on Etsy, and when researching I realised I had so many opportunities to make loads of different designs and I found it difficult to narrow down what I wanted to do for my hanging decoration as there was so much. I tried to look closely at what was popular and the current trends in hanging decorations, and make up with a few ideas until I thought about the door hanger. I struggled finding a shape that would work and balance properly on a door handle, but I managed to do it and thought of a very unique idea. I knew that i wanted it to be made out of wood as this was popular on Etsy, so I created my hanging decoration based off of that and I think it came out really good. The moodboard I made helped me find common themes amongst these hanging decorations, and figured out they were all made of wood and had very neutral colours so that inspired me for mine.
I researched packaging because I hadn’t looked at it at any point in the project so I knew I had to look at some ideas for my packaging. Giftware packaging is very important because it gives you an idea of what the product is going to be like and it’s quality, and I looked closely at the materials used; sustainable materials in packaging is much better for the environment and I learnt that creating packaging out of these eco friendly materials will benefit me much more as it’s not harming the environment and will also get me more customers as some people don’t feel comfortable buying products that will damage the earth and aren’t environmentally friendly. I learnt about what materials you can use for sustainable packaging and I would have definitely tried some of these if I had a bit more time in my project as I don’t think I had enough time to create my packaging ideas unfortunately.
I created all of my packaging ideas on procreate as it’s a software that i’m currently learning so it helped me learn new things about the software and also I prefer to draw digitally rather than in my sketchbook as I can experiment more with different colours, shapes and and brushes. I thought about colour palettes and materials to make my packaging unique and produced a final design which I am really happy with. It links well with the rest of my project and suits the item it’s packaging really well. I wish I could have brought this packaging design to life as it would have a big impact on selling my hanging decoration, however, again, I don’t think I had enough time as it’s kind of a complex design and I’m not sure I’d be able to make it physically. Next time I need to manage my time more so I could create these physical versions of my designs.
I created my hanging decoration final cutout on illustrator so it could be sent to the laser cutter to be cut out onto wood. It took a few attempts to get right, and I kept having to modify certain parts such as the hanging part at the top, I had to take into consideration that it couldn’t fit over a door handle at first, so I changed the shape to make sure it did fit perfectly and tidied up a few of the red spots. Another problem I was running into was the black lines didn’t all connect so the laser cutter was skipping over parts and not cutting them. I had to look closer on illustrator and make sure everything was coloured red and black correctly.
As you can tell, this is not how I wanted my hanging decoration to look - there’s random lines and parts aren’t cut out properly. This is one of the first ones that I got back and I wasn’t happy with how this looked so I had to go back and change it. I’m glad I kept this version because it shows how I have solved problems and added details compared to my final hanging decorations.
This was my final hanging decoration. I am really happy how this came out compared to my first few versions. I used acrylic paint to paint over the wood and I think it look really good and suits my audience well! It’s a good size and fits onto doors well, and throughout my work you can see my development and how I got to this point.
