Fever Tree - Change of Direction and Countries Research

After seeing other people's work at the last crit and speaking to a few people doing the same brief, I realised that I might have got the wrong end of the stick when reading the brief. I chose to read the brief throughly again and see whether they are asking for their label to be redesigned or for the whole bottle to be decorated because I don't think it is explained very clearly. 

'You should work to a ‘wrap’ design that adheres to the current footprint of the 500ml Tonic bottle — and that inspiringly embellishes it, but keeping the information on the label the same.'

After searching what a bottle 'wrap' is, I now think that they want the full bottle to be decorated with the current labels remaining untouched. I am still not one hundred percent certain that this is the right thing to do but it does make sense a bit more now and gives more scope for some different designs. Because of this realisation quite late on into my project, I am having to adapt my idea. I am not planning on working with the cinchona bark idea I had previously but combining this with natural things from each country to make a pattern which can be used on the bottle wrap.  I did a few quick scamps to help decide whether these pattern elements should be spaced evenly or whether they should be more dense at the top or bottom. I think an evenly repeated pattern would work well in this format because it will cover all aspects of the bottle giving it high visual impact.

I did some research into each of my chosen countries to find out what natural products, features and exports are related to them and then used the internet to build up a bank of imagery to work from. 

After this I went back into my sketchbook and started drawing. This didn't last long before I realised it wasn't going well, I was getting really frustrated with the brief and in all honesty, was losing motivation. I felt that what I was doing in my sketchbook was aimless and I thought I needed to change things a bit so instead of drawing, I picked up a scalpel and started paper cutting. I hoped that this would make me think a bit differently and spark some new ideas and different routes to explore. It did lead me to the idea of maybe layering my paper cuts over some textures and colours to see what images I could create.