For one of my modules this semester, I was asked to find a competition or award whose brief I could work towards. This brief would have to be to use my own strengths in design as it would be an individual project. The project that I chose to participate in was designing three t-shirts for three different flavours of Ben & Jerry's Ice Cream. The brief is as follows...
“Calling all artists, designers, doodlers, scribblers and wanna-bees! Ben & Jerry’s Ice Cream is asking you to design a brand new T-Shirt celebrating one of our favourite flavours. Just pick from one of the flavours below that puts you in a state of mouth watering bliss and get creative! A panel of our design gurus will select the top entries, and then you and the rest of our online fans will vote on the best designs. The winning designs will become part of our storied T-Shirt collection when a limited edition of the T's will be available for sale in our Scoop Shops and on our online store. Not only could you become an official Ben & Jerry's designer extraordinaire, each winner will also receive $1,000 – plus a year's worth of free pints!”
The reason that I chose this brief is because I believe it plays to my strengths as an illustrator. I have always felt that drawing and illustrative work was my strongest skill therefore I can use this brief to really show the best of what I can do. Even though this competition has ended, I still feel that it would be the best one for me to complete. In order to complete this brief I will need to choose three flavours from the possible six that have been given to me. These six flavours are... New York Super Fudge Chunk, Chubby Hubby, Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough, Half-Baked, Chocolate Therapy and Chocolate Fudge Brownie.
In order to design t-shirts for my individual project, I felt like I needed to research the brand of Ben & Jerry's ice cream. This is because my project is essentially merchandising therefore when designing my products, they would need to look like they belong to this brand. To do this research I looked at the company's website to understand some of the visual background behind Ben & Jerry's.
As you can see, the design of the website is very clean but somewhat rustic in areas such as font choice. The fonts shown are used throughout all of their branding from their own merchandise to the products they sell. From this I have learned than my t-shirts should use a similar font or if possible the same font to keep in line with their merchandising style. Including similar colours would be something that I will attempt to do with my own designs. However in the brief, it focuses on being as original as possible meaning I will have to put my own spin on their brand.
The colours they have used are bright and crisp instead of being very corporate. This shows the fun-nature of the company which would be something I would love to capture through my own design. Throughout the language on the site, the brand that Ben & Jerry's has create is something that isn't perceived as a company but more of a product. The product being their ice cream flavours, but showing that they aren't appealing to an elegant and elitist audience. I strongly believe that this brand is one that I can adapt my design style too rather easily because of it's unprofessionalism even though it is a professional company. This tongue-in-cheek approach to their branding is what makes this company unique and is why I chose this as my brief.
.JPG)
After doing this, I knew exactly what my designs where meant to look like and could therefore start designing the actual t-shirts. Each shirt will be very cartoon-like in their design because that suits my style of design in addition to the design style of the brand I am creating merchandise for.
I then began to design and develop my sketches so that they could be put into Illustrator. Doing this will allow my final designs to be as professional as possible. Also, creating them in Illustrator will help when I eventually print them onto a T-Shirt for presenting them.
The first design that I decided on was the New York Super Fudge Chunk. I thought in this design I would focus on what makes New York as a city so iconic which is the buildings. Including the flavour of ice cream in the skyline was something I felt would be interesting to view on a shirt in addition to relating it back to the name.
The final design I came up with was for the flavour, half-baked which was the most difficult because the name wasn't as front facing as the other two therefore it was slightly challenging. However I came up with three different designs and chose the best one. They where all centred around the idea of a face or half a face. Through each design, they became more tuned in with the ice-cream idea and ended up with probably my best design.
This initial design was used to understand how I would position the face being either a side-on or front view. Playing with the different facial features on the character to see what would be best suitable for the final character.
This was the final design for the Half-Baked flavour of Ben & Jerry's Ice Cream from my sketchbook, ready to be put into Illustrator and developer further digitally. With each of my designs, I went round the pencil lines with a fine-liner pen to ensure that the details will come up properly on the computer screen. This should make designing it again in Illustrator easier than just a pencil.
After completing the designs, I then added the photographs of them into Illustrator so I could trace them using the pen tool. Doing this allowed me to have a workable outline of my illustrations that could be coloured, edited and refined. In addition to this, I could begin to create the changes that will allow me to make each shirt design different from the next. Therefore you can see in the image above that the far left (Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough) has thicker outlines rather than the far right one (Half-Baked).
As I began to design the half-baked shirt, I decided to ask my peers for some feedback on my designs to have an outside opinion. One piece of feedback was that the design for this shirt was deemed too sinister for the Ben & Jerry's brand. Therefore I went back and did some more research on the brand and then went back to my sketchbook. I decided to make more cartoon-like emphasis on the eyes and mouth as this was another piece of feedback saying that these features where distracting. Going back to my sketchbook allowed me to make quicker changes that I would in Illustrator.
Now that I finally finished outlining my designs, I could then begin colouring them in using Illustrator. The way I completed this was by using the Live Paint tool. This would mean that once I created the paths into a Live Paint object, I cannot change it back. Each design would use a similar colour pallet however the final images would be placed onto a different coloured background to separate them from one another.
Here is the development for the Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough shirt design when I began to include colour. I first made it a Live Paint tool and filled in the solid spaces with the base colours of that section. Then I used the pen tool to create shapes that would be used for the shading on each section of the characters and background.
This is the developed version of the flavour Half-Baked, which only has an outline and the other shapes are just coloured in using the Live Paint tool in addition to creating shapes with the pen tool. With this design, I have decided to have no outlines because I feel like the design would suit it better and the melting ice-cream would be more effective without an outline on each drop.
This is the developed version of the New York Super Fudge Chunk flavour of ice cream which has varying levels of thickness in the lines. Also it has very similar colours to the other designs to allow the themes to flow through the three shirts.
In the brief, it is required that the name of the flavour should be present within the design therefore I had to choose a font that would be best suitable for the Ben & Jerry's brand. I did this by using two different fonts in different methods to see what would work the best. The fonts I used where Advert and Call Me (Maybe?) as these where the best fonts I fount online that matched that of the Ben & Jerry's existing merchandise. I then experimented with what would be the best style for these fonts with making Advent italic and making Call Me (Maybe?) white with a black outline. From these I decided that the best would be just to use Advent regular as it aesthetically matches the design of the Ben & Jerry's font the most.
To create the right effect on the text, I decided to add a white area around the outside of it. This would allow it to be placed on any coloured shirt and still retain the right look for the design. In addition to this, I have placed a stroke around the outside of the image in Photoshop. This means that it would allow me to link the text and illustrations together without looking out of place.
In order to design t-shirts for my individual project, I felt like I needed to research the brand of Ben & Jerry's ice cream. This is because my project is essentially merchandising therefore when designing my products, they would need to look like they belong to this brand. To do this research I looked at the company's website to understand some of the visual background behind Ben & Jerry's.
As you can see, the design of the website is very clean but somewhat rustic in areas such as font choice. The fonts shown are used throughout all of their branding from their own merchandise to the products they sell. From this I have learned than my t-shirts should use a similar font or if possible the same font to keep in line with their merchandising style. Including similar colours would be something that I will attempt to do with my own designs. However in the brief, it focuses on being as original as possible meaning I will have to put my own spin on their brand.
The colours they have used are bright and crisp instead of being very corporate. This shows the fun-nature of the company which would be something I would love to capture through my own design. Throughout the language on the site, the brand that Ben & Jerry's has create is something that isn't perceived as a company but more of a product. The product being their ice cream flavours, but showing that they aren't appealing to an elegant and elitist audience. I strongly believe that this brand is one that I can adapt my design style too rather easily because of it's unprofessionalism even though it is a professional company. This tongue-in-cheek approach to their branding is what makes this company unique and is why I chose this as my brief.
To start designing my t-shirts, I needed to brainstorm ideas about the flavours and what images could be used in my designs of the shirts. In addition to this, I needed to decide on what flavours to use for the three shirt designs. The flavours I decided on where New York Super Fudge Chunk, Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough and Half-Baked. I chose these three flavours because of their names and ingredients. New York Super Fudge Chunk has Chocolate Ice Cream with White and Dark Fudge Chunks, Pecans, Walnuts and Fudge Covered Almonds. The Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough has Vanilla ice cream with pieces of cookie dough. Finally, the Half-Baked flavour contains Chocolate and vanilla ice cream mixed with brownies and chunks of chocolate chip cookie dough. These ingredients will be included into the designs of the shirts.
Some initial ideas for the designs have focused on the names of the flavours so I have focused my designs on scoops of ice cream, chocolate chips. In addition to this, I have decided on created some characters for some shirts in order to give the right feel to the merchandising. Also, I have added designs of some props and pieces to give the artwork context. Before designing the final ones, I began to experiment with the style which I wanted the designs to be in. I done this just my drawing large A4 pictures of a multitude of items. This allowed me to push myself as a designer.
As I finally decided on what flavours I would be using for my t-shirt designs, I decided that I would brainstorm them individually in order to get the most ideas out of them. I began by just brainstorming obvious things that'd be associated with the name, ingredients and flavours of the ice cream in order to understand what I was designing a shirt from. Doing this for each one was extremely helpful as it allowed me to explore all possibilities for each design.
After doing this, I knew exactly what my designs where meant to look like and could therefore start designing the actual t-shirts. Each shirt will be very cartoon-like in their design because that suits my style of design in addition to the design style of the brand I am creating merchandise for.
The first design that I decided on was the New York Super Fudge Chunk. I thought in this design I would focus on what makes New York as a city so iconic which is the buildings. Including the flavour of ice cream in the skyline was something I felt would be interesting to view on a shirt in addition to relating it back to the name.
The next one I designed for was the Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough. When designing them as a set of three, I decided that it would be best for all three to be slightly different in their execution so this one is more focused around characters I have created. Rather than the detailed city-scape of the previous shirt. When they are finally developed, the plan would be that you can tell they are part of a set but each should have their own twist which should allow them to stand out as individual designs.
The final design I came up with was for the flavour, half-baked which was the most difficult because the name wasn't as front facing as the other two therefore it was slightly challenging. However I came up with three different designs and chose the best one. They where all centred around the idea of a face or half a face. Through each design, they became more tuned in with the ice-cream idea and ended up with probably my best design.
This initial design was used to understand how I would position the face being either a side-on or front view. Playing with the different facial features on the character to see what would be best suitable for the final character.
After completing the designs, I then added the photographs of them into Illustrator so I could trace them using the pen tool. Doing this allowed me to have a workable outline of my illustrations that could be coloured, edited and refined. In addition to this, I could begin to create the changes that will allow me to make each shirt design different from the next. Therefore you can see in the image above that the far left (Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough) has thicker outlines rather than the far right one (Half-Baked).
As I began to design the half-baked shirt, I decided to ask my peers for some feedback on my designs to have an outside opinion. One piece of feedback was that the design for this shirt was deemed too sinister for the Ben & Jerry's brand. Therefore I went back and did some more research on the brand and then went back to my sketchbook. I decided to make more cartoon-like emphasis on the eyes and mouth as this was another piece of feedback saying that these features where distracting. Going back to my sketchbook allowed me to make quicker changes that I would in Illustrator.
Now that I finally finished outlining my designs, I could then begin colouring them in using Illustrator. The way I completed this was by using the Live Paint tool. This would mean that once I created the paths into a Live Paint object, I cannot change it back. Each design would use a similar colour pallet however the final images would be placed onto a different coloured background to separate them from one another.
This is the developed version of the flavour Half-Baked, which only has an outline and the other shapes are just coloured in using the Live Paint tool in addition to creating shapes with the pen tool. With this design, I have decided to have no outlines because I feel like the design would suit it better and the melting ice-cream would be more effective without an outline on each drop.
This is the developed version of the New York Super Fudge Chunk flavour of ice cream which has varying levels of thickness in the lines. Also it has very similar colours to the other designs to allow the themes to flow through the three shirts.
In the brief, it is required that the name of the flavour should be present within the design therefore I had to choose a font that would be best suitable for the Ben & Jerry's brand. I did this by using two different fonts in different methods to see what would work the best. The fonts I used where Advert and Call Me (Maybe?) as these where the best fonts I fount online that matched that of the Ben & Jerry's existing merchandise. I then experimented with what would be the best style for these fonts with making Advent italic and making Call Me (Maybe?) white with a black outline. From these I decided that the best would be just to use Advent regular as it aesthetically matches the design of the Ben & Jerry's font the most.
To create the right effect on the text, I decided to add a white area around the outside of it. This would allow it to be placed on any coloured shirt and still retain the right look for the design. In addition to this, I have placed a stroke around the outside of the image in Photoshop. This means that it would allow me to link the text and illustrations together without looking out of place.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
These are the final designs for my individual project. The brief that was to create three t-shirt designs based on Ben & Jerry's Ice Cream flavours. The three that I chose where Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough, New York Super Fudge Chunk and Half-Baked. Each design has been placed on a different coloured background to show they are different designs however the text and art style link them together.
 |
| Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough |
 |
| Half-Baked |
 |
| New York Super Fudge Chunk |
No comments:
Post a Comment