Elise's Designer Blog: May 2010

We were asked to look at the website Serialcut.com and look in how it works as a functioning website. The Serial Cut companycomes across to me as being very professional and a corporate brand that really takes time and effort into making their website user friendly and appealing.
At looking into some of their work I found it to be very interesting and intriguing. Their work is very detailed and very athestically pleasing, as it looks into depth and perception of type and how it can be use and manipulated into a 3D image.

I think their website is able to mix both convetional and radical to work in harmony together to create an image for themselves that is different and original to the competition of other relating sites.

I like the simplicity of their site and how easy it is to get around and see other images with barely any confusion or frustration. I really like some of their images, these are the ones that really appealed to me...

This assignment that we were given was to create a corporate business identity that was to be an original body of work that was to be used in a promotional campaign for a business starting in Wagga Wagga. The first thing we had to decide on was what business industry we were going to base our work on. Trying to decide on an industry to base my collection of work on was difficult, as I am very indecisive but I narrowed it down to two options, either a University or the Hair and Beauty Industry. In the end after doing research on both industries I decided on basing my collection on Hair and Beauty.

Coming up firstly with a corporate business identity was difficult trying to find a name that was original and inventive was a challenge. I was searching for a classy name that was modern, but had something to do with the industry. I came across the name by starting off just searching through the thesaurus for different variations of glamour, beauty and hair. I eventually looked through the internet on the variations as I wasn’t finding anything that really appealed to me and as I was searching through the internet I came across a translation dictionary and as I was trying the different words out in different languages I came across the French version of glamour and it was Seduction. I decided to use that as my corporate identity.

The next step for me was to come up with a colour scheme and a logo for my business. I did struggle with this for a while coming up with a logo. But the first thing I did was come up with a colour scheme and I instantly thought of red, black and white. Then I searched the Internet for different hair and beauty logos, they all ranged in complexity. Seeming my name for the identity of the business was “seduction” I was looking for a classy but seductive logo. I started looking for silhouettes of female faces. I found one that was appealing to me, so I drew up variations of it in my visual diary to see which one I liked the best.

Once I did that I photographed the image I chose and put it into Illustrator and once I finished altering it in Illustrator I thought about the colours again and started playing with them. Once I started developing the promotional campaign and got the brochure I found that I couldn’t get the colours to work in the brochure and honestly I didn’t really know how I was going to set it out in the first place with the lack of idea on how to design a corporate business brochure.
Once I found out that I had more time to work on my assignment before the critique I worked on the colours and decided that I was going to use variations of pink instead as it worked better.

We had the critique during the week and I was very nervous about having my work on show for everyone to critique. Once I finished the presentation simple things from the people in my class were brought up, like the logo was grey instead of white, (which was just a fault by my eye) the with compliments slip was very crowded and needed to be more simple and the type was different sizes and needed to be the same, the hot pink colour for the name Seduction looked like red and didn’t look nice, the background colour was to dominate and needed to be softer, the website in a few of the documents was way to small and wasn’t readable.

Luke spoke on his views and said that the logo was very weak and needed a lot of work, the nose on the silhouette was too big, the curl under chin looked like a “mosquito curl”, the logo had jaggered edges and the black stroke around Seduction needed to go. He did say that the idea was good but it needed more work.

After getting all the feedback from the class, I knew they were all right and I did agree with everything they said. I decided to research more extensively and looked into it more, especially when it came to the brochure. What I knew I had to do was come up with was a new logo and I went back to my original colour scheme of red, black and white. Finding a new logo was hard but I researched the industry extensively and discovered a new design that I really liked and based my work off that. I thought simple is best after the feedback from the critique, and I worked with black and white and with the lips I made them a vibrant red to make something rememberable for the business identity. I spent the most work on my brochure as I really wanted to get it perfect, too the point where I ruled lines on the document to make sure all the type was perfectly even and in line with everything else.

From the lecture that Luke did on designing a brochure I found that instead of feathering my photos to get rid of that ugly line that was created by a photograph I could create a clipping mask with any polygon shape around a photo. I really got a lot of help and inspiration for my own work from that lecture.

On the final week we had to work on our assignment before the due date, Luke got the class to come and look at my logo for the last time as like a final critique and we came to the conclusion that in my logo to make it better was to change the eye to be more classy as it was a bit to provocative for the hair and beauty industry. Also the lips were drawn too full on, and were pouting a little bit over the top.

So I went back and researched those too facial features and I found the lips to be a lot easier to readjust. The eyes are the feature that gives the logo it’s character so deciding on a new eye that gave off a classy but provocative feel to the clients was a challenge. It was something that I had draw by hand and in Illustrator to get they way I wanted it too. I think I finally got it right, I’m hoping.