Brief 1: Final Social Media Advertisements and Evaluation

-Being hand-wrendered represents brand's homemade vegan values, and Etsy's ethic of independent, handmade, bespoke products.

-Digitally drawn vivid colours represent scent's ingredients and smell going hand in hand with the brands fantasy aspect (use of Fairy's within the branding)

-Using real food would resemble/appear too much like an actual cocktail or meal ingredients opposed to a scent, this is why that was not used

-Would have added sepia filter to resemble existing ads but this would have dulled intensity of the scents advertising and lower impact/purpose of design.

-Rustic style represents ethical selling focus of products being vegan- honest and handmade.

-The illustrations were done in a way to give depth and tone, along with the mimic of mist in the heart of the image. The restriction on size meant I wanted to give as much depth and fill of the square to emphasize the visual smell of the ingredients.

EVALUATION

Within this project I feel I have achieved my aim of creating perfume advertising without using models, focusing on the ingredients of the scent itself to allow the consumer to choose correctly for themselves. I wanted the advertising to be more exciting, give more away about the scent and have a bespoke design. I was lucky enough to get such an interesting set from reaching out to Natalie on Etsy.

Whilst this was intended as my client brief, it wasn't what I expected in terms of negotiating and agreement. Although these designs were sent and the client was happy and ready to use for social media advertising of her products, I expected more constructive criticism of the designs, or wanted more of a challenge?

This has shown me that when working in a client led world, I expect to be challenged and don't feel a design is it's best as soon as that which is a positive.

In terms of matching my project brief, working for Natalie was great in terms of her being on board with wanting an illustrative, colourful design which I outlined to her would be the use of ingredients and her own scent tested descriptions, making it as true to her own testing and brand itself. Taking into account her existing retro brand and the ads she had sent me, the pattern style inspired by the 50's prints and typeface experiments were important in getting the right brand vibe.

In the future I look forward to working with clients I get to work more closely with as it has left me with an underachieved feeling.

A challenge I faced for the first time was realising commercially, typeface usability is very different as the majority need to be bought to use commercially- as this wasn't a personal project. Although I enjoy drawing digitally, with type I need a lot more practice as being able to create your own bespoke lettering is highly beneficial. Working in a square format wasn't what I had envisioned, but these were requested this size to be used as social media advertising for her cocktail range so I wanted to include as much as I could that would give off the scent and it's ingredients in vivid appealing style.

The visuals I feel are very packed in and are all different and specific for each perfume which I made sure of, and have an exciting feel to their compositions and detailing. When I got the feedback that the initial designs were rustic this definetley made me feel more confident in the designs being truer to the brands ethics themself, as her brand is also popular for being a vegan brand, which is on the rise.

The process of getting from initial to final designs included consideration of the function of these ads- to advertise the perfume bottle, the name and scents with the visuals, and fairypants brand.

Although the communication was more limited than I would have liked, this was a very exciting project to use my project idea with and I am humbled she was great enough to let me do it. It has given me an insight in to designing for clients and shows perhaps how varied the world of work is. In terms of time management, I completed communication with the client and had the designs approved and finish by the end of October as intended in my brief plan which I am determined to stick to! I work best to deadlines otherwise I get stressed, so this was completed on time which is important to get in to habit in, working with clients. Unfortunately, Natalie didn't really give a deadline and I was happy to tell her when I would have each stage done by and stuck to it.

When choosing this client I didn't know my strengths as well as I do now and which styles I need to work on before working on for a client. Despite this, I feel like with stronger communication and constructive criticism from the client my work would be better and would have been developed a lot more. In future I will do more research of my client if I'm the one approaching. Part of my development this year has also been using Illustrator a lot more which I would have done instead of freehand.

These are examples of the style I would have gone with if I had developed more-

The typeface is more appropriate and mature/clean for advertising the self made brand, with a retro signature look to the names of the scents.