Research and ideas..

I am continuing on my research of 3D direct mailers for the second assignment this week and I have looked into the fantastic works of Marion Bataille; one of the world's greatest pop-up designers.

Meanwhile I have drawn out a brainstorm to generate ideas for my own 3D mailer design, and started playing around with making a few basic pop-up cards - cutting out sections of card in the middle and folding them in so they pop up when the card is opened, as well as sticking extra pieces of card inside cards to create the pop-up effect, this is just to get a feel of 3D mailer design and to understand how it functions so I know what to expect.

Starting the second assignment

Now that I have finished the new re-brand of the City of Wolverhampton, I have been handed my second assignment: create a 3D Direct Mailer to promote the city as a destination. 

In lecture I was shown examples of 3D paper design, origami and inspirational 3D mailer examples out there. To begin this assignment I decided to have a look at more examples of 3D mailer design for my research, and came across many clever and inspirational examples of work, including cut-out 3D mailers, pop-ups, concertina, slide-out and explosion mailers. All of these will be useful in providing me with ideas for when I create my 3D mailer for the city of Wolverhampton.

Logo design complete

From the development sketches I drew last week, I have scanned in the best example and put on Adobe Illustrator for further development, applying colour, tidying it up, smoothing out the lines and making it more professional. I've also selected the typeface I intended for the typography, and I now have my final logo design for the City of Wolverhampton complete.

Logo development

I am now developing my logo idea in rough sketches that are more suited and specific to my music-themed branding of Wolverhampton. From the rough concepts I came up with I decided to use the idea of a guitar image within the logotype of Wolverhampton, where the outline of half the guitar is used to create the letter W. With this I have looked at the use of typefaces and finding a suitable one that indicates the modern contemporary aspect I am looking for. After playing around with a few sketches of this idea, I noticed the guitar inspired image I'm using represents an acoustic guitar, so I have decided to develop it further to make it look more like an electric guitar, in staying with the modern aspect. This is some of my development sketches for the logo design.

My logo design concepts

After some in-depth research into branding design including looking into examples of really brilliant logo designs that I found inspiring and clever, funny, witty etc. as well as also finding examples of poor logo designs due to lack of originality, bad quality design and unwittingly associated to rude meanings, I am now starting to work on creating a brand for Wolverhampton, and the theme choice I have chosen for this will be music.

To start off, I did a couple more brainstorms on Wolverhampton culture and music. Then I started sketching some logo ideas on A3 paper, using the theme of music. Below are a few examples of my rough sketches which i have penned and coloured in..

The first example at the top shows the letters o and l have been swapped to spell out the word love within Wolverhampton, and I highlighted this using a separate colour from the rest of the name. The other examples are more musically themed with the use of musical symbols and a cable wire spelling out Wolverhampton in a single line (wire). 

Research..

Continuing on my branding research, I'm now looking into specific areas. I have looked at the works of branding artists like Paul Rand. 

I have also researched into examples of brands that have been re-branded over the years due to social, cultural and aesthetic changes, progress and evolution in design and technology, and events that have influenced the brands. Here is an example of the evolution of the Pepsi logo design over it's lifetime.

Beginning the First Assignment

My first assignment is City Re-branding. Updating the image of Wolverhampton. I am asked to design a contemporary logo and brand palette for the City of Wolverhampton. After being introduced to the module in seminars I begin the assignment with general research in brands and logo designs of establishments, companies, agencies, businesses etc. based in and around Wolverhampton. These include many different brands associated with the city council, the college, the university, the football club, racecourse, media centres and the science park complex, amongst others.

Whilst gathering this general research I also started brainstorming on the word Branding. This is what I have come up with so far: