Foodpreneurs // Brief

Brief - Collaboration with Andy Foster

Background:

Food& and NortherStrEats are putting together an all day workshop at Belgrave Music Hall for new street food startups and people interested in starting up a street food business. The day will cover everything they need to know, from the legal, health and safety side right through to the creative, branding, promo side. Speakers will include various high profile street food traders and marketing coaches. There’ll be a networking event in held the evening afterwards.

Brief:

Create a brand identity for ‘Foodpreneurs’, a day workshop for people interesting in starting street food businesses. The brand should be modern, using clean typography, but reflect the human side of the business which is supportive, friendly and welcoming. Street food comes in a huge number of different varieties and future events may focus on other areas. Indicate how the brand could also be applied to other industry events. 

Audience:

Foodies, existing street food owners and new entrepreneurs. 

Tone: 

Professional

Friendly

Modern

This is a live brief set by Ross from Food&. This is an exciting brief for me as it is open enough to do something exciting and different, but the audience is specific enough that real focus can be given to . I haven't taken on a lot of branding briefs this year, so it should be a good project to demonstrate core Graphic Design skills and help to strengthen this area of my portfolio. It is also a great opportunity to be able develop a brand for a local event, as this could help to establish some contacts in the street food industry.

300 seconds // Evaluation

This brief was a continuation of a live branding brief I took on during the second year responsive module. It was pleased see another opportunity from 300 seconds to appear in my third year. As the event has grown massively in the last year from when I designed the initial branding, having been hosted by big name media companies like Facebook, BBC and Mozilla and looking set to achieve even more in the next year, l felt that it would be best to collaborate with Andy to utilise his image skills and strong work ethic to evolve the brand for its expansion to different parts of the UK. 
The biggest aspect that I took away from this brief was the importance of accessibility within design. As the client needed us to meet WCAG AA colour contrast standards we both had to conduct research into designing with this in mind. I personally found this eye opening as I had never even considered this as a fundamental part of designing for screen and through my research I discovered that working with accessibility in mind doesn’t just benefit people with visual impairments, it actually improves the overall usability of design for everyone. During the brief we had to respond to client feedback and I thought that we worked well through this process and developed a much stronger outcome because we were forced to re-evaluate our initial solution and think about how the brand could be made to better suit its intended usage and context. With more time, I wish we could have pushed the brief to consider the events themselves and the range of outcomes that could have been produced for them. Unfortunately we both had to move on to other briefs and could not take this any further. 

300 Seconds // Brand Guidelines

We needed to produce brand guidelines to accompany the final range of identities, this would outline how different place names and venues would be applied to the core brand in the future. In giving the brand the flexibility to expand, we also needed to make sure that the brand would be used faithfully by defining colour, typography and usage.

While these would primarily sent out as a pdf we have stuck to a standard A-size to ensure that it can be easily printed in the future. We purposely kept these documents as simple as possible to provide clear information

Hungry Sandwich Club animation // About Us Animation

As part of our collaborative studio self-promotion, we wanted to produce an animation for our ‘about us’ page as we would be able to demonstrate key skills in design, illustration and animation while communicating a tone of voice that is consistent with the brand we have developed.
After brainstorming ideas for animated scenes, we decided to base them off the written points from our manifesto which were already quite visual.

Together, we created a storyboard and broke the scenes up into chunks. Andy developed a visual style for the characters and objects, and we divided scenes to work on. I worked on the longer and more complicated piano scene while Andy worked on the bread and butter and ‘big ideas’ scenes. They ended up fitting together really well and we were both extremely happy with the results.

To make the scene I first produced a quick test using assets from andy's early illustration. I found that a combination of rotating, scaling and using the puppet tool produced convincing character animation. 

Individually, I pieced together the puppets for the superhero Martin and Andy characters, manipulating the limbs separately to indicate that the characters are flying. 

Making the characters fly through the sky was easier than I expected, as I was able to take one long gradient image and scroll this down to look like they are rising into the sky. I had to animate clouds to fill the scene and add to this effect. 

In 3D I created the Hungry Sandwich logo to rotate in the sky like an emblem. 

Here is the combination of the scene I had animated combined with Andy's:

PledgeMusic // Evaluation

This has been one of my favourite briefs of the year, as it was really refreshing to challenge myself to design in a way that is purely and wholly functional, driven by user interaction, functionality and commercial interests. This is a very different approach to work that either me or Andy have done in the past.  Through this brief, I was able to incorporate much of the spare-time reading I had been doing around UI and UX design and the tips and advice I had picked on placement at web agencies in the summer for the first time. Using the design sprint to its full potential, we structured our week in a very strict way. On the first day we conducted thorough research and were able to deeply understand the context that the PledgeMusic service existed in: It’s relationship between artists and users, competitors, features and identification of its existing and potential USP. This gave us a fantastic base form which to start designing. We wanted to redefine PledgeMusic with a focus on the ‘journey' of the artist through the funding process and shift focus away from rewards, where other competitors have an advantage. 

Our strategy for this brief was to make all design decisions on paper, redesigning elements with functionality, not aesthetics, as a primary concern. This proved to be a much stronger way of working for me. At the time, the class was working publicly in the gallery space and we were displaying all of our design sheets on the wall as we went along. At the end of day 2 we had covered the entire wall and it really made us appreciate the scale of the design challenge we had taken on. By working separately through the idea generation stage of the print, we had developed different solutions to identified problems with the current site. One of the bets parts of the project for me was conflict resolution, where we had to note down conflicting solutions of a post it note and go through to pick the best solution, compromise between them or develop something new. This reassured both of us that we had explored all possible avenues before choosing the most appropriate solutions. 

In the end I was extremely proud of the outcome, which demonstrated that I could utilise my time management and organisation skills and translate these into a functional design process to produce a considered and appropriate solution to the design problem. This is the kind of work I would love to do in the future and I was pleased to have the opportunity to develop some key web skills through this brief and feel that this is a strong addition to my portfolio. 

Hungry Sandwich Club

We were not happy with the business cards we had printed in college, and had always intended them to be a temporary solution. In preparation for final show and life after college, we visited Nick aka The Print Project to look at some examples and discuss what we should do with our final business cards. Andy has had a placement with Nick so was familiar with the process and workshop. Nick explained what he does and showed us the equipment. We then looked at loads of previous cards he had printed using various stocks, inks and processes, which I found fascinating.

We discussed what would be possible, and we really liked the idea of using a split fountain to achieve a gradient on our logo. We picked a stock, weight and the colours we used and sent this over to Nick. In order to ensure that we didn't make any mistakes on an expensive order, we printed off different sizes of the front and back of the card to see how they compare in print. We quickly identified the sizes that we wanted for each and were glad to have gone through this step as we selected sizes that were considerably smaller than we had chosen on screen.

This exercise was so important for me as it became clear that what I had thought looked a good size on screen looked way too big in print. Without actually printing them off we would have end up with a much worse results and it would have been a very costly mistake. 

Desired effect from the split fountain

final artwork sent to be made as a polymer plate. 

North Bar // Leeds Mencap Apprentice Challenge Awards

As participants, we were invited to attend the awards evening for the competition. At this stage, we didn't know how many of the beer mats had been sold so we were excited to see how much we had raised compared to others. After a presentation by Leeds Mencap, we found out the results.

North Bar had sold around 1,500 of our beer mats which raised £785.77 for Leeds Mencap!

While this wasn't enough to beat some other teams in the competition we were really happy to have raised this much with Duke and North Bar. We even got a certificate for having the most innovative funding idea. Neither me or Andy had been to a charity event like this before so it was a good life experience for us.