Earth Day 2015 Poster

Here is my Earth Day 2015 poster, Mean Mug Coffeehouse edition. To take the photos, I went and bought a pack's worth of styrofoam cups at Wal-Mart for about a dollar to use as props. Which, of course, is ironic because the whole point of my poster is to promote sustainability and not use these cups for the good of the environment. A funny story that I thought maybe some of you might enjoy. Since I have the cups though, I'll try my best not to waste them!

Final Three Piece Collateral Set

Here are my three pieces for the collateral set. The first is a mailer with coupons, the second a gift card, and the third, a set of four coasters as a promotional mailer.

It took a lot of planning to come up with the template designs but it paid off. All three are original templates I created specifically for these pieces, with the client and branding in mind.

I'm happy with the way the three pieces turned out and working on them has given me so much insight into package design, printing, and working with vinyls (coaster mailer) and I've learn so much during the process.

You can see the templates here:

 This is the outside of the coaster mailer. It has the large, attention-grabbing text in the front (top-left) and a photograph and address label on the back (bottom-left). The text you see on the right will be on the inside of the mailer once the design is folded.

This the design for the inside of the coaster mailer. The inside has a photograph and text, and the rest are of the design is blank because it won't be visible once folded.

 The outside of the tri-fold mailer.

 The inside of the tri-fold mailer.


















The coupons that go with the mailer. (front and back)

 The outside of the gift card holder.


















The inside of the gift card holder.
The design folds to create an insert for the gift card.

The front and back of the gift card, which is inserted into the gift card holder.

Collateral Coaster Mailer

Here is my coaster mailer, which is a promotional item sent to people to create brand awareness.

There are four coasters in the package with the Mean Mug Coffeehouse logo on them. To create these coasters, I went to Home Depot to retrieve several of their flooring board samples, which happened to be the perfect coaster size (4"x4"). Then I trimmed the corners to be round and applied vinyl cutouts of the logo onto them.

 This is the front.

Collateral Pieces

Here are two of my collateral pieces. One is a tri-fold mailer with two coupons for free drinks and an illustrated diagram of what goes in each drink, and the other is a gift card and gift card holder.

For the gift card, I printed the front and back pieces, cut them, and glued them onto a plastic card to give a sense of heft.

I'm pretty pleased with how smoothly making the gift card went and even more pleased with the results.

These are shots of the final drafts of those two aforementioned pieces which are both ready for the critique on Monday. In the meantime, I'm working on some ideas for mailer coasters.

I want Mean Mug to have several pieces as collateral to showcase all the various elements a coffeehouse can use to advertise and spread its brand.

How To Score Paper With Only A Spoon

That's right, you heard me correctly. After folding my collateral by hand with a ruler, I knew there had to be a better way to avoid the creases. I wanted to have a professional looking crease, crisp and clean, and I didn't have all the tools required to typically do so.

So I tried googling and found this video:

It's amazing and it's the real deal! All of you should try this out!

Good luck with your collateral pieces - I can't wait to see everyone's on Monday!

Mean Mug Ad Campaign

These are my finalized ad posters for the client's ad campaign. After many revisions and discussion with classmates and Stan, I made changes that I'm pleased with based on their feedback.

Here are the three ads.

This the the 8.5"x11" ad and I increased the saturation of color on the left side, adjusted the type so the headline, "THE MEAN MUG DIFFERENCE" is on one line, and changed it to the same dark brown found on the bottom slab. The copy on the slab has been reduced in font size as well, as not to deter from the main content, which is the "mugshot" photograph.

For the 3.5"x11", I changed the color on the right to a more brown color from the red I had previously. I also made the background cooler, whereas it was orange before.


For the 5"x5", there hasn't been many changes.

For all of them, I got rid of the slab on the top which used to be behind the headline text. I opted to used the burn tool in Photoshop to darken the background behind the text to make it more legible instead of using a colored slab.

Revising Past Projects

Over the past break and days proceeding, I've been revising and re-printing past projects in preparation for the portfolio we have to put together. This is one of the projects that went through said revision process.

It's the book cover I designed for GRD3000 and you can see the before/after.

Before

This is the before, where you can see that the text on the spine and back aren't as neat as the text on the front. I also redid the tree on the back and changed the cover art on the front to something more universally symbolic to the book. I also edited the frames of the front and back so they do not become cropped by the edges.

After

The chalkboard background has gotten darker to improve contrast and the text on the flaps have been changed from Didot to Times New Roman for improved legibility. It was hard to read the thin white text on black. I also omitted the "written by" above the author, Harper Lee, because it's understood.




Overall, the thought behind the revision was to make things easier to read, refined, and de-cluttered. I think I achieved that goal with the revisions I made, and this will be the version going into the portfolio. I had to get out a chalkboard and re-write/re-draw these elements but I am pleased with the effort.

Gift Card Ideas/Inspirations

These are some gift card ideas I saw while searching Google Images for inspiration.
For one of my collateral pieces I am thinking about creating a gift card holder and designing both the holder and the gift card. I'll have to figure out how to create the template and how to fold/cut the design. I think it'll be a fun experiment. I have already pretty much finished a direct mailer collateral design so with the time remaining until critique, I'm tossing ideas around on creating another collateral piece, hence the gift card ideas.