Sip Coffee- Just a lil fun!

Sometimes you need a little fun project to dig your teeth into. And sometime that means working on a fake brief for a fake coffee shop in one of your favourite towns! Luckily I had some help with the brief.

 

The Brief:

Name: Sip Coffee Shop, Sip Coffee, or just Sip – whatever works best.

Description: New business moving into a small property in St Louis. Slightly outside the hipster part of town. Will cater to normies as well as offer vegan and vegetarian options. The owner is a cute slightly hippyish woman in her early thirties. She wants the shop to be welcoming and feel relaxing. The coffee will be of a high standard, but snacks and such will be an equal draw. People will be able to sit in but tables will be limited. Decor will probably be quite cute, fun and quirky.

Required: logo, business card, takeaway cup design, letterhead, t-shirt and signage.

Colours: Anything as long as it’s not dull. The cafe will be fun and the colours should reflect this.

 

Logo Designs:

 

End Result:

Let me know what you think!

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New Portfolio Site

CORRECTION on Oct 23:

Sorry my site is currently down for maintenance it should be back up soon!

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My new portfolio site is up and live! Check it out here.

Can I get a screen print?!

When you’re working as a digital designer getting messing and physically working with your hands isn’t something that happens regularly. I was really excited when I found a master class in screen printing at a local brewery. When I started with this design it was an intricate set of 3 poppies. Once I got going I forgot how annoying it is to cut a stencil with an Exacto knife (scalpel in the UK). I powered through, with a pint of course and ended up with a nice stencil. The best bit was getting to screen print though. Just getting covered in ink a bit and physically working with a medium was something I missed. I definitely want to get my own screen printing kit soon.

D&AD All Done.

So this is my finished project for D&AD. I’m pretty happy with it. I tried to keep it clean and simple. To see how I got here look at this post.

D&AD Work in Progress

D&AD New Blood is something I’m really excited about. I haven’t been doing much for myself recently when it comes to art direction so I’m excited to be working on this.
But when I started I was overwhelmed to say the least… I mean look at how many briefs there are and they are all great choices. I spent so much time thinking about what I wanted to do. I mean currently I’ve been focusing on design so I didn’t want a purely design brief. I found myself narrowing the briefs down to 3 that I liked the best.

 

WORK IN PROGRESS NOTES… EXCUSE THE TINY IMAGES AND SKETCHES, I’M STILL WORKING AND DON’T WANT TO REVEAL TOO MUCH. (shhhhh……)

Ford, DesignBridge and John Lewis were the ones I focused on, but as you can see from my notes those three turned to the one very quickly. I decided the DesignBridge brief was the one for me. I’ve been working on it for a while and I think I may have the concept narrowed down. And although the brief is a product design brief I’m going to include some print ads that present the concept further. I can’t wait to present my idea for how to make a beauty brand that breaks the cliche and stereotyped gender branding types.

 

 

Brand Redesign Concept: Verizon

Verizon wireless is a well known cell phone (mobile 😀 ) company in the States.  Although I never personally used their services they are a very popular company. They recently decided that it was time for a redesign and although I totally agree with the thought, what they did is not the best. See the logo’s below.

Old

New

The check is still there, it’s still a sans serif font, still black and iconic red. But really?! it’s clean which I like, but it’s pretty boring… Yeah just don’t like it. BUT it didn’t stop there… They designed this website.

The Site

My comments

Yes I did just draw comments on it. I mean as a site it works, but I don’t understand the icons…

LIKE THE GSA REDESIGN THIS IS A WORK IN PROGRESS. BUT I LIKE THE WORK I’VE DONE 😀

I decided to have a go in trying to redesign it. Starting with sketches of course and then creating it again in illustrator.

I tried to keep the logo consistent with the original design. Keeping the red and the check mark in a way, playing with fonts. I ended up being happiest with this one:

I feel as though it makes more sense then the floating check mark and it’s more modern than the old version. I still want to work more on this, so I will try to come back to it.

Brand Redesign Concept: German School Association

When I lived in St. Louis I worked for the German School Association of Greater St. Louis. It was an organisation that I was really proud to be a part of. We taught German culture and the language to students every Saturday morning. My classes were children’s classes, but we also had adult classes. But this post isn’t about how great my experience was or how great the organisation is. It’s about something that really bothered me about the company. The Brand Design! From the logo to the Website, I was never really happy with it. I just thought it could be better. I mean take a look…

Their Current Website

FIRST OFF THIS IS A WORK IN PROGRESS PROJECT, BUT I WANT TO SHOW THE PROGRESS I’VE MADE. 😀

I decided that I should do something about it even if it was just for me to see what redesign I could accomplish. So I began to sketch.

I tried to think  about the various sides of the German school and it’s mission. I thought about how they are trying to show the traditional while enticing students to be curious and explore the modern side of German culture. This lead me to the two design channels.

 

 

I then decided to bring the designs into Adobe Illustrator and bring them to life a little more.

German has a great deal of “traditional” and “modern” typefaces that are really  attributed to movements and the culture. I started with blackletter fonts and thought that might be too traditional for a school in 2015. So I looked to Bauhaus and tried to draw inspiration from there. Looked at classic Bauhaus posters. I ended up really liking the layered G & S look, but still not sure if that is right for the school.

I started to delve into their website and critiquing what worked and what didn’t. My comments are on the website below. I’m going to need to spend more time working on this, but I think I’ve made great progress so far.

 

Motion Graphics inspiration

For some reason I have decided that I should create a new motion graphics piece. My motion graphics course was one of the hardest things I have ever done, but hey why not do one more for fun…?! What is wrong with me. Anyway before I do so I thought I would get some inspiration and with the amazing Helen Sell I found this: http://www.fromupnorth.com/best-motion-graphics-of-2014/. 25 of the Best Motion Graphics of 2014 was exactly what I needed. I picked out two of my favorites:

The illusion of life

The Things I Love

Just rediscovered these…

So my friends and I did a campaign for a fake temporary tattoo company for our Masters course in Creative Advertising. We used photographs of ourselves in the campaign and these are just a few of the edits we liked at the time. It was so long ago and I hadn’t seen these in forever. I thought it was worth reposting.

Brandink cont.

Just a few of the photos that didn’t make it into our campaigns. We really had a lot of fun during the photo shoot.