Cath Kidston Iconic Design Initial Research...

Although the Cath Kidston brief iterates that the print designed must be conversational not floral based, I needed a place to start. I decided that looking into her most iconic and well known floral prints would help me to establish a feel for her overall style. 

There is a huge vintage aspect to Cath Kidston's products and you can clearly see the 40's influence in the floral patterns. The contrasting pink and blue hues used are very iconic to the Cath Kidston brand (they are even the colours of her logo) and I like how these tones further emphasise the vintage style.  The designs really rely on colours that combine together to create the impression that the flowers have been shaded. Although from a distance the shapes look detailed when you look closely the designs are actually made from strips of colour that combine to give them a detailed 3d look.

The print above is a another floral based design that I think is another well known Cath Kidston design. In this design the designs are self contained which makes it easier to create a repeating pattern- you don't have to worry about edges you can just repeat the whole shape and it will integrate regardless. Again the same colour scheme has been used as before which once again displays that colour scheme as a part of the Cath Kidston brand something that should be considered when designing. Again there is a distinct 40s feel to the pattern. No outlines have been used within the flowers shape has been conveyed through the use of light and shade.

I should definitely consider looking into various periods in history since there is a strong period base in much of her work and it may help to provide inspiration. 

Cath Kidston Brief

The Cath Kidston Brief

 The brand:

• Approachable and inclusive
• Warm and friendly
• Cheerful and fun
• Confident and quirky
• Imaginative and unique
• Modern and relevant
• Comforting and homely
• Straightforward and real

The prints are:

• Contemporary classic but not retro repro
• Reinventing our favourites but not copying our past
• Coloured using a bold and distinctive palette
• Used in a fresh, surprising and modern way

Considerations:

• British sense of humour and cheekiness
• English heritage

The target customer:

29 year old female, no children, first proper home, funny, witty creative, independent and optimistic.

Likes:

Creating,

Going out

Festivals

Vintage Shopping

The Country

She is a modern British woman.

The Project

Design a new conversational print taking into account the brand, target market and print style. Examples of conversational prints within our range would include Cowboy, Garden Birds, Guards of London – these are prints with a recognisable picture within them. Classic Cath Kidston floral, spots or stripes would not be described as a conversational print.

To be used in Women's Fashion, Women's Accessories and Home.

Your print can take any visual direction you wish, as long as you believe it to be in tune with our brand.

Please submit the print in both repeat tile and stepped out versions, and create three different colourways. You should use a maximum of 12 colours.

Overall I am really excited about what I can produce for this brief- its specific in what it wants but the subject matter is very much up to me which gives me a wide scope. I am worried about not adhering to the Cath Kidston style so I'll have to be careful when producing my print. 

YCN Briefs

The new project requires us to choose one of the YCN briefs, the briefs are a part of the YCN student award so it is a live project. The idea is that we adhere to the guidelines of the brief we choose so that we can submit.

All The Briefs

Bear
Boost
Cath Kidston
Champneys
Decc
Domino's Pizza
Eastpack
Fedrigoni
Femfresh
LTA
Marriott Hotels
Morrisons
Nescafe Azera
Oasis
Petplan
Redrow
Royal Albert Hall
Standard Life

After looking into all of the briefs I narrowed it down to my favourite choices: Bear, Cath Kidston and Fedrigioni. I dismissed the other briefs because I found the subject matter too broad or dull, I wanted to find a brief that allowed me to play to my strengths; illustration, but at the same time I didnt want to waste time making a decision. After consideration I ruled out the Fedrigoni brief because the final outcome a desktop calendar advertising the Woodstock range of paper did not give me any scope to really design, I was only initially interested because I liked the physicality, the sculptural element that could be introduced.  Bear looks like a fun playful brand but I think there too much of a typographical element to it- although I like designing my own text I think coming up with original ideas would be hard for this brand. Due to this I'm pretty much decided on the Cath Kidston brief- designing a new print- it allows me to really experiment with Illustrator in a drawing style that is very different to my own.

Evaluation...

I am really really proud of what I achieved within this project I  love the style and the overall theme. I love how my fruit looks and I really like how it works within my retro theme. Im really happy with my promo I think its dynamic and fun which completely matches my overall theme. Ive tried to ensure that my brand is always promoted through the use of colour and type and I had a lot of fun making my promo. I would have liked to have an additional second at the end of my promo because it ends a bit fast but I'm already at the 10% additional timing allowed. I planned my timing much better this time round in this project so I dont have any issues with that, After Effect was easy to use and I think I've done well integrating all my elements. I would have liked to explore some more complicated effects in After Effects but my project didn't require anything complex and I had so much going on it was easier to just use the simple transform tools.

I like the look of my game and I am generally happy with my app visualisation, but I found the visualisation much more stressful to generate because it had a lot of fiddly elements. Making the game was the hardest element because I had to have a lot of pears falling at one point to make the game. Pre-comping my segments was helpful because I could repeat certain frames throughout as and when I needed it. I used text and a click circle to display the gestures which makes it clear on both iPad and iPhone. I have used the same visualisation for both iPad and iPhone primarily because we had very little time. I found through my research that games dont really tend to change on iPad or iPhone though so Im not worried about using the same animation for both although if I had had more time I would have liked to make my navigation on the iPhone fractionally larger. I also made sure that my sizes of my animation matched the official iPhone and iPad sizes already researched.

Overall I liked my project initially but there was too much to do and not enough time to do it so it became incredibly stressful (I dont think its got anything to do with my time management either because I was very organised). I also found that the negative comments voiced by one lecturer on my type choices despite my justification of its use really knocked my confidence because it made me feel like what I had produced was a bit rubbish, although after getting a few more opinions on the type by my other lecturers that were positive on the subject I felt a lot better about my project. I think that the text and style are down to personal preference and personally I am very happy with what I've made. I definitely think I've explored a new style and I think this that my promo in particular is one of my favourite finished pieces.

Text in Promo...

I introduced a text element to my promo which was evident during my crit but it was suggested that I make my text larger and expand. The placement of the bubble is supposed to look like its within the fruit and the explosion of the fruit reveals it. The bubble is reminiscent of the speech bubbles within comic books and pop art which I think helps to cement the retro theme even more. I added some extra dots within the text as well to really push my pop art style.

The Crit....

Crit was entirely unhelpful, I'm fairly proud by what I have achieved and it was implied during crit by one of my lecturers that my typography choices were unconsidered and poor, which implied through extension that my final product was poor (something that I didn't take well because I have slaved over my project and I like to do things to the best of my ability). Having said this the class seemed to really like both my promo and my visualisation and had no problem with the text because it matched my brand. They liked the retro theme and felt it was fun and upbeat. It was suggested by another lecturer that I should make my text bubbles slightly bigger within my promo and that I needed to incorporate a bit more to my game to fully portray all of the games elements. I will try to make these changes for hand in.

After Effects...

Using After Effects was much easier this time around because I was already familiar with a lot of the tools used. Again I created both my visualisation and my promo using the basic transform tools. Because I had designed and drawn out most of my elements within Illustrator is was mostly just arranging these objects so that they moved fluidly. Making my fruit explode was probably the most fiddly part because I had little bits of 'fruit' that needed to fly outwards with a revolving trajectory. It required a lot of patience and a lot of layers but I did manage to make it slightly easier on myself and use the parent tool.

 These are some of my layers for my promo- which I stupidly didn't pre-comp because I wanted to time certain elements primarily the backgrounds to the music. Although it didn't bother me overly once I had finished making my fruit explode because I didn't have as much to deal with in my next frames.

I did a lot of pre-comping for my visualisation which was really helpful because I had several elements that were repeated throughout (the home screen being the main example) and it allowed me to play with my timings when I put it all together.