The Brief
Competition: One of the north's leading property development business (S Harrison Developments Ltd) are in need of a bold, cleanand modern advent calendar design on a 1:1 ratio. The advent calendar will be
For the design, we are wanting a contemporary Christmas themedadvent this year; that would be described as bold, clean and modern. If colours, are too pastel, it wouldn’t work as well when reproducing. Dimensions of the previous advent calendar were 20.5cm x 20.5cm. So, basically the design needs to be square and we can scale from that.
Deadline 5th October at 5pm.
This brief seemed pretty open to me and the quick turnaround of it meant I could churn out some work under pressure and get something completed to get the ball rolling with my extended practice module. The idea of a contemporary christmas theme was something that intrigued me as so much traditional christmas imagery has been totally overdone. It would be nice to have a breath of fresh air from that.
Initial Ideas
I started with christmas lights as my theme which then developed onto houses which I thought was vaguely relevant as this is a property development business. I took inspiration loosely from gingerbread houses for these sketches. On the bottom row of roughs I started to pull together a composition, I like the idea of the largest tree being in the middle as if it is the centre of a town or something. By looking at Harrison Developments Ltd’s website I could see they have involvement with charity work and also started off as a small family business, both of these things bring a sense of community to mind and I think the idea of a village or town at christmas evokes this idea too.
Inking
I has a really tight deadline for this brief (I decided to do this brief at 11am on the day of the deadline which was at 5pm). I started inking out some designs based on my sketches, admittedly I was feeling the pressure so took a more simplistic approach to my drawing. After having enough elements I was happy with, I arranged them in a square format on photoshop as specified by the brief. When arranging the pieces, I moved away from my rough by not having the central christmas tree. However, I don’t think that actually makes much of a difference to the concept behind it.
Colour
I really wanted to avoid the red and green colour scheme that is really overdone at christmas so I found some winter images I liked the colours of and used adobe kuler to select a colour scheme I could use. The purples and yellows seemed to soft in my opinions and I don’t think they matched the ‘bold, clean’ aesthetic the brief is looking for. I chose the bottom colour scheme because I felt the colours were strong enough to be considered bright but had different enough hues to stand out against each other. I consider blue to be a cool, crisp colour and with its relations to the cold and winter, it felt appropriate.
I played around with colour on Photoshop, deciding against a pale blue background. The brief had said to be wary of pastel colour because of how they will look after being reproduced. White seemed best, especially as this was a 3D product it would be applied to and from the previous examples shown, the other sides of the product have white backgrounds.
Editing
When the design was almost complete, I thought it might look better if the houses had some grounding so I extended their base lines. I was torn between the two designs but after asking for some feedback from my peers I decided to submit the design without these extra lines. I had also very slightly increased the saturation of the image to make the colours pop out against the white a bit more.
I submitted the design on time!
Reflection
I am really happy I managed to complete this brief in such a short amount of time and I actually made something I am pleased with. I think that if I had more time to do this, the design would have been more detailed and refined, I feel like the time constraint has caused me to cut corners a bit which is obviously something I would prefer not to do. I will see how my design does in the competition but if it is unsuccessful I already have plans of how I could use this design in a repeat pattern or christmas card design. (This isn’t me preparing myself to fail, it just got the cogs turning in my brain!)
Deadline 5th October at 5pm.
This brief seemed pretty open to me and the quick turnaround of it meant I could churn out some work under pressure and get something completed to get the ball rolling with my extended practice module. The idea of a contemporary christmas theme was something that intrigued me as so much traditional christmas imagery has been totally overdone. It would be nice to have a breath of fresh air from that.
Initial Ideas
I started with christmas lights as my theme which then developed onto houses which I thought was vaguely relevant as this is a property development business. I took inspiration loosely from gingerbread houses for these sketches. On the bottom row of roughs I started to pull together a composition, I like the idea of the largest tree being in the middle as if it is the centre of a town or something. By looking at Harrison Developments Ltd’s website I could see they have involvement with charity work and also started off as a small family business, both of these things bring a sense of community to mind and I think the idea of a village or town at christmas evokes this idea too.
Inking
I has a really tight deadline for this brief (I decided to do this brief at 11am on the day of the deadline which was at 5pm). I started inking out some designs based on my sketches, admittedly I was feeling the pressure so took a more simplistic approach to my drawing. After having enough elements I was happy with, I arranged them in a square format on photoshop as specified by the brief. When arranging the pieces, I moved away from my rough by not having the central christmas tree. However, I don’t think that actually makes much of a difference to the concept behind it.
Colour
I really wanted to avoid the red and green colour scheme that is really overdone at christmas so I found some winter images I liked the colours of and used adobe kuler to select a colour scheme I could use. The purples and yellows seemed to soft in my opinions and I don’t think they matched the ‘bold, clean’ aesthetic the brief is looking for. I chose the bottom colour scheme because I felt the colours were strong enough to be considered bright but had different enough hues to stand out against each other. I consider blue to be a cool, crisp colour and with its relations to the cold and winter, it felt appropriate.
I played around with colour on Photoshop, deciding against a pale blue background. The brief had said to be wary of pastel colour because of how they will look after being reproduced. White seemed best, especially as this was a 3D product it would be applied to and from the previous examples shown, the other sides of the product have white backgrounds.
Editing
When the design was almost complete, I thought it might look better if the houses had some grounding so I extended their base lines. I was torn between the two designs but after asking for some feedback from my peers I decided to submit the design without these extra lines. I had also very slightly increased the saturation of the image to make the colours pop out against the white a bit more.
I submitted the design on time!
Reflection
I am really happy I managed to complete this brief in such a short amount of time and I actually made something I am pleased with. I think that if I had more time to do this, the design would have been more detailed and refined, I feel like the time constraint has caused me to cut corners a bit which is obviously something I would prefer not to do. I will see how my design does in the competition but if it is unsuccessful I already have plans of how I could use this design in a repeat pattern or christmas card design. (This isn’t me preparing myself to fail, it just got the cogs turning in my brain!)
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