find & share: packaging

brand: suave

product: men body wash

target audience: men who recognize their own need for washing, and the occasional (or frequent) woman who facilitates the washing of a man.

mode of appeal: ethos by way of dale earnhardt junior's recommendation.

experience audit: i liked the subtle curves of the bottle, and the color seemed appropriate. the colors are certainly the loudest aspect of the current design. the consumer pops open the cap and sniffs it almost immediately. there is factual information to be found on the back, but it is secondary to the front. this looks very similar to most soaps and shampoos for men.

survey says: "well, that guy loves it. and he has nice hair. shampoo. refreshing. blue. men. gradient." (it isn't shampoo.) & "dale earnhardt jr. looks constipated. that's offensive. it says refreshing. it's blue, like they always market to guys. and silver. which they also always market to guys. it's boring. it's suave body wash."

brand: westcott

product: geometry math kit

target audience: moms and dads purchasing school supplies, the kinds of kids who buy their own school supplies.

mode of appeal: ethos by way of teacher recommendation and westcott's age as a company.

experience audit: i was drawn to the foldover package with the snap. this package is noticeably, awfully, bland. the consumer flips it over, and then unsnaps it and experiences the inside as well, pretty rapidly.

survey says: "a plus! it's plain. blue and grey. very dull. it's a geometry math kit with a drop shadow. it lists angles. it's got a ruler and protractor." & "it's informational. it's boring. it's math. it's covered in numbers. it's blue and silver. sterile, scientific. it's a geometry kit. it's got a compass."

brand: whiskas

product: temptations

target audience: cat owners, particularly those who want to treat their cats but don't want their cats to get fat.

mode of appeal: pathos by way of cartoony narrative.

experience audit: this package is very loud with ridiculous looking cartoons on it. the bright yellow with those drawings are quite potent. the consumer flips it over quickly because the front read doesn't take long. neither the front nor back are terribly informative, although they both contain some level of information. these are a little floppy, so you have to be careful to stand it upright.

survey says: "friendly, comic. it's bright. called temptations. there's only one photograph of the treat itself, everything else is illustration. it's crunchy outside and soft inside. it's food, but i don't know for what." & "looks like a dog. the treat is crunchy outside and soft inside. it's yellow, bright, offensive. these are cat treats. it's got speech bubbles or clouds or something. i don't know why. it's by whiskas, it's called temptations."

brand: heaven

product: red devil shorty

target audience: cigar smokers, particularly new, who want a nice cigar but don't want to smoke all of it.

mode of appeal: pathos by way of mythology.

experience audit: this label is beautiful. i'm drawn to the narrative form in the tiny, perfect image. the consumer automatically smells it as soon as they've admired the label. there is no additional information given on the individual cigar. perhaps on the box instead, given that its intended context is in a box with a set of its own, or at least surrounded by other brands of cigars.

survey says: "red squiggly lines, little image that i couldn't quite process. has people. a cigar. it says red devil. cherry something on the bottom." & "it's a cigar i guess? called the red devil or something. very nice little illustration. packaging seems warm and inviting, which is good for a cigar. cherry flavoured? not a lot more experience around it. has the barcode. i wanna open it."

brand: self expressions, a division of maidenform

product: the i-fit bra

target audience: ladies with a bra cup size between an "a" and a "d" who feel that they may need some level of additional padding and lift.

mode of appeal: logos by way of infographic. 

experience audit: the dainty little infographic really drew me into this package on that small pink label. the colors are bright and poppy. the consumer turns it around and holds it to their chest to inspect if/how it might fit. given the bra's shape and hanger, the back of the label doesn't reveal any necessary info. the infograph is somewhat novel but other than that, this fits unnoticeably in with all the other bras and  labels.

survey says: "this looks comfy and soft, it's purple. (n/a.) this is an a-cup, because it's circled. it's got an obnoxious pink 'new self expressions' thing. the tag has a girl in her bra on it." & "it's got a happy girl in a bra. she must be happy because her boobs look nice. the label is pink. it's called i-fit. it's pretty boring. there are diagrams of the padding."

folly ads

 

these are my first three attempts at a newspaper ad utilizing the imagery from my poster. as i understand it,  when a poster gets chosen, that designer then must work out two other touchpoints for their mini-campaign: a newspaper ad, and a billboard. i chose to work first on newspaper ads. tomorrow, we find out whose posters are chosen. scary!

final peter nero!

here is where my folly poster has ended up! i'm really pleased with it. i was having a lot of trouble with type, and my imagery was just a little too flat and unfinished. i completely redrew all of my images to include better detail and specificity, and to heighten the angles, allowing my type to integrate more effectively and more interestingly. 


on a less formal note, the most exciting thing about my choice to use a bird imagery is how many different reads there are for its meaning. i began with the metaphor of piano keys being related to birds, and in this, you can see an allegory of music spreading its wings: music taking flight. then, there's the speed and agility of a bird, the lightness of its movements like a master's hands across a piano keyboard. there's also the read (my original intention, back in the rhetorical matrix) of the literal magical transformation from instrument into dove, this ability nero has to make magic from music. the dove itself, of course, is wrapped up in its own connotations as well: it's a stately bird representative of peace and love. the pianodove, then, is a symbol of the flight of music, the magic, when played by an artist as talented as nero, and the powerful good that can come from it. 

[jessi] language

through this project, ("a lyrical anthology...") i sought to find a new method for analyzing gertrude stein's tender buttons by charting her syntactical structures. this book is a musical score of 10 poems, generated through the intentional derailment of the flow of her text. the melodic nature of her poetry is revealed through her refrain-like repetition of sentence structures, both inside single poems and across all of her text. acting towards the text as a conductor might the orchestra, i chose to call out hierarchically words and phrases from within the pieces that, when read across the duration of the book, begin to construct their own poem. it was my intention that the experience of retrieving the book be a reference to old fashioned (victorian) music boxes, from which a rudimentary instrument could bring out a beautiful tune. ideally, when presented with the box-experience and the typographic compositions in conjunction, the reader will be unable to read the text without assigning some semblance of pitch to each word, given their height on the page. in this music box, the only limit of the rudimentary instrument is our own imagination. 

tender buttons process

because my type compositions were set fairly early on, i had plenty of time to experiment with my cover imagery. my first try looked a little something like this:

 

but kidwell encouraged me to try to incorporate some imagery in addition to the ornament i had been making, so these were some of my attempts:

all of this, it seemed, was a little too much. too heavyhanded. we had a lot of talks about how to reference the victorian music box experience without trying so hard to recreate it, that delicate line it's necessary to walk to be a contemporary designer alluding to old things. ultimately, i reigned my cover way, way back to a single piece of ornament in the center, particularly because my box's shape is going to be ornamental enough. which leads me to:

the amazing router/plotter machine that allowed me to assemble my box! all i had to do was compose in vector form the shapes i needed cut, and decide how, exactly, the cuts/levels that belong in each of the shapes.

my vector layout looked like this:

 i took this file into the woodshop and john riley opened it in the router's program. we spent probably an hour going through each shape and telling the machine the depths and kinds of cuts it needed to make. once we finally started, we still had to stop and revise the toolpath probably a half-dozen times before we finally got it right. only lost one piece due to user error! (that's why i had the pieces to build two double-high boxes: just. in. case.)

peter nero: second round of digital nero

these are the next set of refined or expanded compositions! i cleaned up my piano keys in both cases: in the rotated piano by adding more and spacing them more accurately, and in the piano birds, i cleaned up the gaps between the keys to make them more consistent. i also experimented with cropping and the amount of birds.

peter nero process: first digital comps.

from my refined sketch phase, you might recall i was taking some piano birds, some camouflaged piano hands, and some rotational symmetry into the next step, which was digital. here's what came out:

we decided these pianos were a bit too sparse and simple and that i needed to add detail if i were to move one forward. the angled piano and vertically italicized type was the pick out of these two.

guest critic chuck haddix had been interested in my piano player silhouette so i tried that out, both highlighting the rotation and also downplaying it. both of these got cut.

these are, unfortunately, just photoshop mocks of my plans for this concept. the reason for this being i did not have easy access to a piano, and i believe it would be a hard sell to get somebody to let me paint some hands and then stage the photos, particularly if i hadn't yet tried the method to practice. i had begun winning permissions to photo a piano, but this concept didn't make it through either. the idea became not enough about becoming one with the keys and too much about having ghost hands.

 these compositions seemed to get more potent the less and less they contained. once i got down to the single bird and the zoomed in piano keys on blue, the composition seemed pretty strong. this was my primary new direction for the next digital set, soon to follow.