OUGD406: Studio Brief 04 - Speaking from Experience (Ideas)

Following on from the idea I had about potentially making something 3D I thought about possibly making a small cube with each side of it a different piece of advice or tip for uni.

Another idea that was sparked from this idea of giving out advice and the students taking something away from it was to package little tips/tricks in takeaway packaging of some sort. A possibility was a paper lunch bag filled with little designed boxes that have a mixture of illustrations and typography on them.

Another idea was to have a box that would be hand held size for the sake of convenience and would contain little slips of advice. The reason why it would be hand held is because anything bigger than than and it could potentially become something more than a small hand out piece, which is what I'm aiming to have.

Reflecting back to my initial thoughts of how I could make these small little bits of advice something useful to double up as, possible tea/coffee coasters. I thought that this could be brought into the box idea full of little separate advice slips. The pieces of advice within the box could actually be tea coasters in themselves if on a thick enough stock. This would make each individual piece more substantial than a slip of paper and also would be something nice for students to have as it's not often we have tea coasters hanging around within the flat.

For each of the little bits of advice, I wanted to create a visual illustration of it in context for example 'Shop at Aldi' would be written on a receipt. Initially I had the idea of either purely typography based or type coupled with small little illustrations but thought that having it largely illustration based would make for a more appealing visual.

I made a list of roughly the things I wanted to illustrate for and create a tea coaster out of. It was a a mixture of quotes from students and advice tips from either myself and other fellow students that could possibly help out the first year students, whilst being somewhat entertaining and relatable.

- Shop at Aldi

- "Beware of blogger, it's a temperamental little sh*t"

- "First year doesn't count anyway"

- "F*ck it, shall we just to la fonte?"

- "I'll just go for pre drinks"

- "Book your print slots now!!"

Considering there are two sides to the coasters, I thought that I could run with the idea of having both large scale typography on one side of the coaster and and illustration to match with it on the other side.

I wanted these coasters to be striking and to stand out when place against any surface so I went with a bold but simple illustrative style that makes for a nice visual, whilst the opposing side is the matching type. Again with the typography, this was to stay relatively minimal to go with the illustration. I chose to use Akzidenz-Grotesk for the type as this is sharp and hard hitting typeface and I feel it fits best with the illustration.