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RBH Live Brief - Written Evaluation

For this project, I have decided to choose the RBH Creative Communications live brief; producing work for Church End Brewery for their Christmas campaign advertising a seasonal, festive beer. I think that aiming towards working on this brief was an easy decision for me right from the start, as this was one of two projects that centred around advertisement design, something I personally think can bring out a person’s peak design skills, as it requires creating imagery to work with the product and branding, but to also create something clever that will stick with the desired audience. Bringing intelligence into design work is something that future clients and creatives will be looking out for, as the main point of successful design is about making something that stands out and becomes iconic in some form. I think that working within advertising, at least for this project, will really help clients see some of my potential creativity, and be a strong point within my portfolio. The reason I decided upon this brief in particular came down to the inspiration from RBH, the creative company behind CEB’s (Church End Brewery’s) previous advertisements. With past campaigns including ‘World’s End’, ‘ShakesBeer’ and ‘Sporting Gold’, RBH has shown CEB’s aims for their campaign, with a more comical and creative approach, which very easily gave me an idea of the audience, “predominately male connoisseurs of craft beer and avid pub drinkers”, and a few ideas of how I could tackle the project, still with a sense of challenge, as it would have to be able to compete their previous campaigns. As stated by the company, “Church End Brewery is irreverent and independently-minded. We can say and do pretty much whatever we like, as long as we always convey our passion for brewing”, meaning I don’t have to limit my ideas for what I produce other than it having a festive theme, which doesn’t really limit it too much as there is a wide array of Christmas adverts to find inspiration from and help me develop the ideas I create. Through some research into what the brewery has produced, I discovered the huge selection of almost 250 different beers they have created, each having a clever name and theme to it, which again adds to the open-mindedness I should have going into this task. With ‘limitless’ ideas being said, I am also glad that RBH gave us some must-haves for the project that CEB requires, which include a name, branding, posters, a pump clip and a beer mat. I feel like this will help me a lot further down the development process as I can easily decide upon which ideas will work with all of said essentials, and what may not work. RBH also included some extras ideas that we could add to our projects, which I think are quite good to know about even if we don’t have the time to work on them, as it can help me figure out whether the concepts I create can flex out into other area, such as filmed advertisements and / or social media engagements.

I started working on some scamp ideas, focusing purely on creating jokes and puns that mix Christmas and beer together so that the final design will have some form of relation to past Church End Brewery campaigns. I also was fixed on the fact that I knew the advertising would be straight up photography based, much like the ‘World’s End’ or ‘Reinbeer’ campaigns. One of the things that I also kept in mind when coming up with each idea was to think of how each one could connect in some way so that if I’m between a few ideas, I can slightly alter them, so they could fit into the same campaign. Once I had produced enough scamps to the point that I thought was suitable to continue, I displayed them to tutors to get some feedback on what they thought could work and what might appeal to the audience the most. I started by pitching the idea, which I decided to call “Kissing Under the Influence”, about a “love story between a man and his beer”, as I thought this was the best comedic route to go and would suit alongside past Church End posters if done correctly. The scamps that I had that would relate to this idea actually, if presented in the right order, seemed to make a story of how the man would see, then approach, and finally sip the beer. My other main pitch was to create posters split down the middle, showing two sides to Christmas; one side showing a boring or traditional theme which comes across as quite dull, and the other showing a more lightened version of the other side, which seems to be made better with the presence of the pint. This idea would have the title “Ho(ps) Ho(ps) Ho(ps)”. There were a few other ideas that had appeared in my scamps that I also pitched as potential designs I could go forward with, however some of these ideas could have had some probable issues that could affect how well the outcome would come out. This included straying away from the photographic based and simplistic designs that made previous posters for Church End Brewery so effective and creating a deeply edited piece or drawn work for my designs, and / or creating some less comical designs, as I don’t think that these aspects would fit into the Church End’s advertising approach, which is what has made them a more notable brewery by RBH. Both ideas seemed to be taken quite well overall, but the majority preferred the first idea, seeing the further potential it could have. With this in mind, I began further developments on this particular idea, including working on the coasters and pump clips and how I could expand from the story that the posters portrayed and create new ideas expanding off of it to fully build the campaign. After these developments, I proceeded to take some photos, creating a collection of imagery which I could implement in my posters as well as digitally alter to display some of the other requirements for the brief.

Once I had produced some partially finalized designs, I was ready to present my ideas towards some of the representatives from RBH. I decided to mainly show off what I had created for my main idea of ‘Kissing Under the Influence”, but also present to them a couple of quick designs that I created for the ‘Ho(ps) Ho(ps) Ho(ps)’ idea to gather their opinions on this idea too, and whether or not they prefer it over the other. After presenting to the client, I received some relatively positive feedback, as well as some constructive criticism as to how I could improve upon my ideas. Firstly, they seemed to appreciate the overall aesthetics of designs of what I had produced, as it was simplistic showed a clear and equal focus on both the audience, the product, and the relation between the two, much like in the advertisements that RBH has already created, showing my understanding of the audience through analysing previous campaigns. They also were very positive on the photography produced for each of the posters, which I explained I was able to obtain professional equipment for so that I could attempt to reach a similar quality to that of their creations. Another thing they enjoyed were some of the subtler comical inserts within the imagery, as I purposely gave some of the things in the photo shoot for the posters a more DIY/budget look to them. As for areas to improve upon, they thought that some of the wording on the posters might be seen as a bit risky in some respects, mainly with the title of the beer that I pitched; “Kissing Under the Influence”. Although the subjects I used for the shoot were a part of the target audience and did very much appreciate the title, the clients informed me that the wording gives more of a focus on the effects of drinking the product rather than the taste or enjoyment of the advertised drink, which may come across as controversial to people outside of the range, potentially making them prevent the target audience from purchasing the beer, which is an aspect I hadn’t really taken into consideration before as I mostly focused on how the main audience would feel, which doesn’t just apply to this project in particular, but though most past projects too. This applied to both the ideas I had presented. I personally thought this was a well-thought-out critique which I will try to focus on more throughout future projects. Overall, the feedback I received on my ideas was very useful in helping me understand my position on my skills and knowledge when it comes to advertising and branding, which will definitely help me progress in future work in this area, especially as the evaluative comments are coming from professionals in the industry that have a greater understanding of successful advertising.

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London Graduate Fashion Week Look Book - Final Outcome 

Here shows the final cover and a few of the spreads created in my final outcome. This was a look book designed specifically to display the work of Birmingham City University graduates, Yinggi Xu and Elisha Hill-Wood, that would be on show at the London Graduate Fashion Week. Due to the high level fashion styles on display, I thought it would be best to create a sleek, minimal design, incorporating textures relating to each piece, to create a fitting aesthetic to the pages. The main challenge of this task was finding a layout style that would work with both designers’ style, with one being more vibrant, while the other having a more bleak and darker tone. Overall, I feel as if I made something that works well with both styles, finding a way to make the garments created by the graduates stand out, while also blending into the various layouts of the pages. I feel as if you can actually see my layout skills develop and become more interesting and obscure as the look book goes on, showing how I am improving further on my editorial skills.

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Live Brief 2 - London Graduate Fashion Week Look Book - Ideas and Developments

The second live brief set for us was to create a Look Book to display the work of recent Birmingham City University graduates work for the London Graduate Fashion Week.

Before generating visual ideas for my look-book, I decided to first of all collect various images of existing spreads from magazines, such as ‘032c’ and ‘Boys Don’t Cry’ which may potentially share an existing style to what I plan on designing. I also included a few small labels to show my understanding of key elements in editorial layouts.

I then moved on to scamps of potential spreads, which unlike the previous live brief, were all created on-the-spot in a short period of time so I could visualise any brief ideas coming to my head, some being obviously better than most from an editorial layout point-of-view. The spread scamps were some of the best that I was able to come up with, showing varying amounts of inspiration from the previous look-books I had come across.

I created a few covers compared to spreads and took a bit more time too, thinking about how I could develop something more unique in style that differed from the previous covers I had seen. I also knew that whatever I went with had to be interesting enough to get the audiences attention, while also being simplistic and modern in style to match with the direction I wanted to take my spreads with. 

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Church End Brewery - Final Outcome Mockups

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Church End Brewery - Final Outcomes

These are the final posters that I displayed to RBH, following the first developed idea. The overall feedback seemed pretty positive, but did give some good constructive criticism which gave me a clear idea on how to improve upon them. They first of all loved the photography and imagery on the posters, as they not only worked well in embracing the humour that would attract the audience, but also match similar styles to that of their previous adverts, showing good understanding of the brand and the client’s work for it. One issue was that some people, mostly outside of the audience, might not see the humour around the tagline which might be risky, as it could give the brand bad publicity, but agreed it would be slightly difficult to work around. However, despite these problems, the actual campaign would only be across Birmingham, not national, which means that the it wouldn’t be too bad in this case, but would be something to keep an eye out for in future work.

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Church End Brewery - Ideas, Scamps and Developments

To begin this task, I needed to start to understand the what sort of things the target audience would be looking for, and I thought that the best way to do this would be through looking at previous advertising campaigns RBH had produced for them. I noticed that the majority of the seemed to be humour based, with one of them, titled ‘The World’s End’ (featured above), standing out from the crowd for me. I realised that there were a couple more campaigns, including ‘Reinbeer’ and ‘Shakesbeer’, which featured a similar advertising approach of involving the target audience in the ads. Noticing that these were among the most successful campaigns for the brewery, I decided to continue with this idea in a few of the scamps I later produced. 

When it came to scamps, I began quickly generating lots of smaller ideas firstly, as I normally would for a project like this, but the ideas didn’t really come across very well. This is when I instead put in a little more time into my scamps, giving each one a solid idea behind it, with a tagline which incorporated both beer and Christmas in most cases, making it easier for me to further develop whichever idea I chose.

I decided to take two of my scamp ideas to got on and further develop. The first of which focuses on the relationship between a man and his beer, and has a romantic comedy vibe to it. The second has posters split down the middle, displaying how the beer lightens up the mood on one side, and how it’s a more boring/traditional Christmas without it on the other. After pitching both these ideas to other people, the first seemed to come across as the better option...

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Live Brief 1 - Church End Brewery

Before being presented brief’s by various agencies, I decided to look into each of the tasks slightly more in-depth to gain an understanding of what they would contain and what I would be producing, so that when it came to deciding, I could sign my name down on the project. For me, I was initially stuck between the two advertising briefs from McCann and RBH; one focusing on selling towards a young adult audience (18 - 25), whereas the other was aimed at a middle/older aged audience. Despite being within the age bracket of the McCann brief, meaning I most likely have a better understanding of the target audience, I decided to go with RBH, as I was hoping for a bit more of a challenge, to help expand my creativity and gain a further understanding of a market I hadn’t delved into too much beforehand. Furthermore, the broadness of what my outcome could be really intrigued me, as there were endless ways to approach it and styles to explore.

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Billboards and Signs for Catalyst Festival

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Personal Module Evaluation (Enterprise of Graphic Communication)

From what understood about the task, the aim for this module was to create a brand identity for our own festival, which initially got me very invested into the project, as personally, I am very interested in various genres of music and am an avid festival goer, which I thought might give me a slight advantage for the overall product of the task. I knew from the start about various other festivals that existed and how they branded themselves, and I knew that I wanted to take a slightly different route in terms of style and theme as a means to stand out from competitors. The majority of festivals use vibrant colour schemes and use similar imagery to each other, but I thought about tackling it a slightly different way, using a design scheme that showed an understanding of the musicians performing and the art directions they would go, as well as showing the vibes of the festival. Due to the music scene I was looking at, I thought that the best festivals to look in to would be Reading & Leeds Festival, which is probably one of the biggest festivals in the UK, and would also probably be my festival’s biggest competitor, and Quebec City Summer Festival (also known as FEQ), which is a large festival located in Canada. The festivals attract slightly different audiences, with Reading & Leeds bringing in a younger audience, the majority of which aged between 16 – 21, whereas FEQ attracts people of all ages, which is probably due to it headlining big names from the rock scene back in the day, as well as popular artists today. I wanted to create a festival that was a mix of these two, headlining artist that both younger and older generations can appreciate and are familiar with. To start my project, I first of all had to decide upon a name, which was probably one of the hardest challenge within the task, as there are already a lot of existing festivals, small and large, that used a lot of the names I was coming up with. After generating around 40 or so names, I came across the word “Catalyst”, a word used not only in chemistry terms, but also meaning ‘a person or thing that causes an unexpected event’, which I think could be a name that creates more interest in what occurs at the festival. Once I had the name, I had to decide upon how I wanted to create my festival’s logo. I began by creating rough sketches of images I could use for my logo, but ultimately, I thought it would be best to create a straightforward text-based logo, as that’s what my sketched designs started turning into. I took to photoshop to make some quick initial designs, as I thought I’d be able to create a clearer image of how they would look finalized on there compared to just drawing them. I created 13 designs in total, which showed pre-existing festival logo inspiration and album artwork inspiration from the types of artists I planned on having for my festival, including Hipgnosis and Hugh Gilmour Design inspired logos, who are some of the names behind popular record design from the 70s and 80s. From there, I asked various people who also did design work and others who were also doing the same task on which of the logos they preferred, explaining my theme and what festivals mine would be similar to. This lead me to two of the logos, which I did some additional developments to. Out of the two, there was one that I was able to be much more experimental with, which I created a development that looked perfect for my festival. From there I began searching for a location for my festival and creating a line-up for the event. I needed the festival to be in a popular location that was large enough to hold approximately up to 100’000 people or so and was near to places where people could resupply themselves if needed, rather than being in a random location in the middle of nowhere. I randomly stumbled upon the Aylestone Playing Fields in Leicester, which was the perfect location and size for what I needed. It was also split into various sections, making it easier for me to allocate camping zones to specific areas and positioning stages easily, which not only would benefit me, but also the festival goers as they would be somewhat familiar with the layout. Sticking to familiar layouts, I made the line-up poster very similar to pre-existing ones, making it clear to who is playing on what day and the order that main acts will appear. I also came up with the idea of associating a colour to each of the days of the festival, with red representing Friday, green representing Saturday, and blue representing Sunday. I carried this idea into other aspects of my festival, including merchandising, advertising, banners, and festival passes, where I found interesting ways to combine them with my logo to create stylish designs. In addition to the main task was the Secret 7” task, where I designed a sleeve for the song ‘Castle Made of Sand’ by Jimi Hendrix. After analyzing some of the lyrics, I discovered that the song is about the inevitability of death, but also the fragility of life, which is represented as a ‘castle made of sand’ in the song; “Nothing lasts forever, and nothing is certain, and eventually things will fall apart”. I also created a sleeve for the song ‘Help’, by London Grammar, which follows a similar toned art style to what the band would use, looking much more minimalistic compared to the other design I created. Through doing this project, it has made me realize that I have vastly improved my skills over the past year, noticing my ability to generate ideas faster and improve on old and develop many new skills. I still have a lot to work on however, including getting to grips with some of the software, having more confidence in some of my work, and seeking out more feedback from tutors during my project to get the best results possible.

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Secret 7″ Task

Designed For Jimi Hendrix - Castle Made of Sand

After analysing some of the lyrics, I discovered that the song is about the inevitability of death, but also the fragility of life, which is represented as a ‘castle made of sand’ in the song; “Nothing lasts forever and nothing is certain, and eventually things will fall apart”. There are various moments in the song which talk about moments where people who feel as if they’ve lost everything and no longer appreciate life, unaware of whether or not things will get better. I decided to create a drawing of a pair of hands holding sand, which I intended to represent life, letting it pour away through the cracks. I have also displayed one of the arms with cracks and cuts showing damage, while the other arm being fine, showing that there is more to them than what’s bringing them down, but because of the damage on the other side, it goes mostly unnoticed.

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Festival Project - GIF

Since I decided to follow a colour scheme which looked at RGB, I decided that a glitch effect would work best with my logo. Some of my initial designs for the logo actually had some glitch effects applied to them, similar to what’s in this GIF. This is the first GIF I’ve made so I had to follow a tutorial to achieve the effect and understand how to create a GIF within Photoshop (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OVZrxaVLQ04). Once I got to grips with the process, I added additional frames and applied different blending options to achieve a more refined look i.e. with the text blending in with the grunge background, and a smoother transitions from the original text to the static/glitch text.

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Agency Job Roles Research Task

1.  Creative directors are ‘the creative leads at advertising and marketing companies, working with designers, artists, copywriters, sales teams and marketers to create a vision for products sold’. Creative directors plan advertising, oversee the creative process and give guidance to the creative people that work under them.

2.  Advertising, promotions, and marketing managers typically do the following: Plan promotional campaigns such as contests, coupons, or giveaways, plan advertising campaigns, including which media to advertise in, such as radio, television, print, online media, and billboards, and negotiate advertising contracts.

3.  Communications managers perform a variety of tasks, such as the creation and development of print and online advertising, email marketing, web site management and content development, press releases,  corporate videos, marketing budget development and cost tracking. They may aid in the preparation of presentations and/or speeches geared toward employees.

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Module Evaluation Essay – Tom Camsell

The aim for this project, as I understood, was to produce campaign material for a cause of our choice, highlighting the seriousness of said cause and putting light on it so that people can realise whether or not it affects them and/or what they can do about it. The issue I decided to look into was mental health problems, mainly in men, as I personally feel as if this is a huge issue at the moment, with later research heavily supporting this.

I decided that for this campaign, I will be producing work for the NHS. I chose them as when I first began researching previous posters raising awareness for men’s mental health, I discovered that the NHS have made a few campaigns over the last few years on this issue, the majority of them being about not being open about how they actually feel. After doing some research on the problems surrounding men’s mental health, I found that most men don’t see mental health as big of an issue compared to physical health, which I hadn’t really seen put clearly in any of the posters I had come across. I thought that this could be a good direction to go in due to the fact that this point isn’t really spoken about as much when it comes to mental health problems, so it could potentially make more of an awareness if that was the focus of my campaign.

When coming up with ideas on how I could portray this, I think that one of the better ones was creating imagery of a heart merged with a brain, with the heart representing physical health, and the brain representing mental. By merging them together, the idea is to try and show the audience that there shouldn’t be differences between the two on how they are viewed in terms of importance, and that they mean as much as each other, and that they are both ‘your health’. The choice that I made with this idea by making the imagery realistic/photographic rather than drawn would more likely catch the attention of others, much like ‘THINK’ road safety adverts do, by being more real and honest rather than subtle.

Although I thought that this was the better idea for my project, I did also come other with some other ideas which I could have further developed in different ways. The initial main idea for my project was to blend multiple photos of a male together displaying different emotions, positive and negative, with the more negative emotions being faded out, showing that the person is trying to make their true emotions ‘invisible’. After thinking of ways of how I could further develop this from a poster, I decided to try and create in on photoshop, but I personally didn’t thing that I came out as well as I thought it would, as nothing really seemed to stand out that well on the poster, and there was too much writing on the poster, which I thought was a disadvantage as it would be better to have something that is straight to the point and slightly more ‘simplistic’. I then developed another poster which followed along the same lines as the last, with more bold statements on it to reach the attention of other faster and more successfully, yet it’s design lacked the imagery of the first, and I still thought more could be added to it to gain the attention of my audience.

I researched into other designers of previous mental health campaigns that went into similar and more effective areas that I was trying to achieve. I came across Ewen’s Creative Studio, which were behind the NHS ‘Stamp Out Stigma’ campaign, which showed not only how dark some people’s situations were, but also how real they were as some of the situations could have come across as relatable to the audience or people they know. I also discovered the ‘Seeing Mental Illness’ campaign created by Modpod Creative, who’s poster concept represents a physical manifestation of mental illness that cannot always be seen and is therefore not discussed. This was one of my favourite designs I found as it followed closest to the message that I wanted to spread, being just because the pain isn’t physical doesn’t mean it’s not there and/or shouldn’t be treated. This design also gave me the idea for what became my final piece for the project.

When it came to producing my final piece, I felt that making the overall look seem more graphic, much like a physical pain would be, would speak out more to my male audience better. For this, rather than going online and using ‘free usage rights’ images for the brain, I decided to go out and find a real brain from a local butcher so that I could get images of the necessary positions of the brain that I could need, which helped out a lot in my work. This is probably the furthest I’ve gone out of my way when it has come to collecting images for my work, and I think it paid off as it really helped when it came to the poster design as I had much more to work with.

Overall, I think that my final piece came out the way I wanted it to because of the way I went about doing it. I think that it also helped that I designed some of my initial ideas on photoshop before fully developing them as it made it more clear to me how they would come out and whether or not I’d be happy with the outcome (which for some was not the case). I think that the research I conducted and my own personal knowledge on the issue I looked at in this project really helped when it came to producing the work, as I think that I was able to understand good ways in which I could reach out to the audience in the most effective way possible.

However, I do feel as if I had a few problems with this project. When it came to doing research on practitioners, it was hard to find the designers who had created the actual campaign as there was usually no mention anywhere of who created it, as I found with one of the design groups who had actually taken the work off of their portfolio on their site. I also felt that some of the side tasks that went with this project were slightly confusing, in my opinion, in terms of how to approach the task effectively and how to apply it to my current project, as I did in the previous projects (this could have been to do with the issue I chose though).

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some notes I made on living a day as a colour, including colour theory and the choices I made in the day in relation to the colour (especially in terms of music)

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Stimulus Side Project - Virtual Light (William Gibson)

To start our stimulus audio walk, Nick and I headed towards Digbeth, which on the day had an eerie vibe to it, with the lack of people around and fog filling the streets. After around 10 minutes of walking we had reached the canal which leads to Curzon Street, so at this point we stopped walking and began listening to the ‘Virtual Light’ audio clip, and began taking in our surroundings and searching for moments in the audio that related to where we were. 

Listening to the audio, I was able to pick out particular words and phrases that had a slight connection to our location; talk of ‘decayed landscapes’, things ‘blurring, melting into the fog’, being set on a Tuesday Morning (like the task), and talk of a character noting findings into a notebook, much like I was doing at the time. After finishing the audio clip, I began to think about key words that reflected on what we came across on the walk. I think that ‘decay’ would have been one of the better key words to describe what we saw as, from what can be seen in the photos, found some aged buildings, some of which seemed to be abandoned and/or not cared for for some time. With the lack of people there too, there was a very quiet atmosphere, which probably helped in immersing us into the audio and picking up things in it that we probably would have most likely missed. Surprisingly, despite the fog making the area seem more dull, ‘colour’ and ‘detail’ were some other key words we thought described our walk, as with abandoned/old buildings came graffiti, which, although can’t be seen in all the images, pretty much surrounded us while we walked down the canal.

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The concept behind contrast is to ensure that every element within a design does not look the same. In essence you should have a number of elements that look vastly different to the others within a design.

Contrast can refer to colour, shape, texture, size and typeface and is necessary to ensure a design does not look boring or one dimensional.

An example of good contrast can be seen in 'Lados No.29'. In this example, both colour and shape have been used to create contrast. The dark blue and black on yellow is a high contrast palette. Also, the circular shape behind the model’s head is in contrast to the magazine shape and the other rectangular forms on the page.

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Repetition simply means the reusing of the same or similar elements throughout your design. Repetition of certain design elements in a design will bring a clear sense of unity and consistency.

An effective use of repetition I found was in Red Fleece Editorial Magazine. In this editorial design, the consistent use of line weight and style, typeface, white space and grid usage has added repetition throughout the entire layout.