Inspiration you were missed !

I had my process tutorial with Lorenzo this morning and what a breathe of fresh air it was. We had a good chat about how this project can be really fun and not so serious. So...

I sat and decided i need to move on from thinking oil has to be a liquid... why does it need to be presented in a  bottle.. why should it stick to conventions. So we thought about tablets, being able to drop a pill into the engine and be done with it sounds much better than standing over the engine pouring a huge 3 litre bottle of the black devils fluid all over the engine bay...

What if i designed for the future?... what if i designed for the entire range of cars, from classic to high performance?... the answer is a brand which does all this... but first i needed to think up what i would be creating..

What is already there which holds liquid but in a different format. A quick think left me with the ideas of printer cartridges. glue sticks. washer tablets, gravy jelly tablets. The packaging could still be boxed but for example a black glue stick could be packaged in a smarties style tube... something not seen with motor oil ever !...

Mind map:

So I've listed some decent ideas for what it could be and I'm defiantly going to create a range of the same product. If i can come to terms with which form i want it to take for example a tablet. I can create different packaging but use the same insides to save time.

I decided to draw up the ideas of packaging quickly i came up with some funny ideas about the printer cartridge lots of people liked it however i really enjoyed drawing up the glue stick idea..

So what are the problems with oil as it is now?
Its quite a male orientated game i feel. The size of these oil drums and engine bay know how can leave some females with less knowledge of the car leaving it completely...

Pouring the oil can sometimes end up all over the engine leaving the bay smoking up and being a mess.
The codes are all quite confusing with different types for diesel,petrol,classic,sports,performance.
Its always the same boring bottle with the black liquid...

The above has given me enough ammunition to try tackle this in a really innovative way... Im going to design something which feels fun, easy and affordable. A range of oils for all the types yet in a much easier format. The glue stick could easily be packaged in a tube and dropped into the oil tank.

So where do i go?

I have come to the conclusion that I'm lost... i haven't a clue where to start at the moment. It appears everyone else is mid way nearing the finish line and I'm running in circles... so I'm going to list a check list of what i have done so far...

• Mind Maps
• What is good
• Initial Ideas
• Ways to advise people on topping up motor oil.
• Environmental 
• Packaging
• Pencil Drawings of logos
• 150 logos
• chosen logo
• Logo Development
• trial and error of logo
• chosen final
• Practise Packaging
• Nets created to form certain packaging.
• realised the bottle packaging would be the most relevant and useable.
• Ideas to follow on from initials
• How am i going to get this out in the public
• How will i make my produce look attractive enough to make people want to use it?

Action Plan...

1. I need to structure my work a bit more and blog up to date pieces and research.
2. Create a sheet showing logo, chosen colours, reasoning, designs, sketches.
3. Produce a final idea of what i will defiantly produce and propose.
4. Create the items.

Deadline: Returning from Reading week i want to be at stage 3 of my action plan.

Packaging Task.

After producing the above i felt the bottle container looked the best, however i received mainly comments on how the logo was good and with my designs being about motor oil i felt the bottle container one would be the one id develop more than the others.

I wish i had read more into the brief however i thought we just had to produce the nets and then just place our logos onto them to see if they worked. Whereas others where really creative and they all looked really good.

The nets i used looked like this:

[insert other images]

Logo Development

We were given a task to produce 150 logos. We had to only use words which were used in conjunction to our chosen 'good'... i set about using A4 paper to fold up into four A6 divides.. The first few sheets came easily throwing any idea i had down. the problem came when i reached around page 15 and the idea began to just look rubbish and i felt i was just drawing them for the sake of trying to make sure i had 150 for the sake of a crit... I understand that it was bound to become harder when the designs got tired and used but i feel 150 was a bit excessive. I managed to think up of a logo which i was really happy with around page 10 and i had a lot of backups ready to fall on...

[INSERT IMAGES OF A6 LOGOS]

After showing them to friends they decided my idea for a logo named 'shift' was the best bet using the idea of two arrows one going up and one down to create negative space to form the letter H.

[INSERT SKETCHES OF LOGO ]

I then moved onto developing them on illustrator... I tried alternative typefaces but i felt Helvetica gave it the bold and chunky yet legibility i was looking for.

I feel the above shows that the design works with not just one typeface yet the others apart from the first show a bit more space than id like to and when showing people they couldn't all straight away tell the arrows were to create negative space.

My inspiration for this came from the FedEx design.

ISSUU pdf top ten

My chosen ten things to know

I have thought about what i would like to know in a quick easy booklet about print. After receiving the teachings from the tutors i feel i have put together a good list. My problem with choosing the items to include were that i didn't have a definite target audience so i have based this on problems and subjects i found myself facing problems with.

1. Colour CMYK & RGB
2. Paper Sizes
3. Stock
4. Finishes
5. Imposition
6. Folding
7. Duplexing
8. Book Binding
9. Paper Types
10. File Types

The above is an unorganised list of parts i struggled to understand from even a ND level. so putting my knowledge down should make things easier.

What is Design for Print?

Brief

Produce a ‘Top Ten’ manual of things to know, consider or remember in order to produce successful Design for Print. You should use the seminars and tasks from the module as a starting point for your own individual/independent investigation of the methods, processes and formats that can be used to create innovative but practical solutions to print based design briefs and all aspects of print- based delivery.

You are required to document your research and visual material on your Design Context blog. For submission for assessment you will also be required to select, summarise and evaluate appropriate source material as a multi-page pdf. document that shows your understanding of print processes, conventions and creative options from the perspective of a graphic designer. It should also demonstrates your ability to effectively organise and present a body information in a designed format. This document should be uploaded to your Design context blog via 'Issuu'. See additional briefings for further information.

‘Chapters’ might include, colour conventions, inks, stock, format and others.

You will need to evidence research into:

• Production Methods
• Stock considerations 
• Colour systems 
• Commercial costings 

Tagging of the categories is essential. Failure to organise your research effectively may loose you marks.

Mac Induction 3

InDesign Recap

• We have been talked through in design again. Starting with how to open a document. We were then told about bleed and how the bleed is used to allow for mistakes.
• We were shown how to increase the type via keyboard shortcuts. 
• We have been talked through the colour pallet again
• We then moved onto 'placing' an illustrator file into the program
• This proved easy and again we have been shown all this before.
• We were told the reason that the vector looked pixilated was due to the advantage of speeding the program up.
• Shown a shortcut for opening illustrator up whilst in another program
• Told the difference between PSD files and TIFF files.
• Introduced to editing monotone images in InDesign and being able to change the printed colour

How to check if everything will be printed off as we want it too.

When we send an item off to be printed, selected printed and receive a composite print.

Yet when sending to commercial print its a bit different. 

• Select output
• Always a Composite 
• Commercial printing separates the document into each of the items colours.
• If using spot colour you need t make sure it doesn't print with CMYK.