presentation review

Overall I am fairly happy with how my presentation ended up although there are some aspects that can be improved, as with anything. The first thing I will say as you will notice straight off the bat with my presentation I kept it very casual and chatty, it could of been a lot more professional and in-depth but I personally wanted it to be a bit more relaxed and undemanding. Thinking back I would of liked to check with Dave what would of been best e.g. straight to the point no nonsense or a bit more laid-back like I chose. Another point I would make although I like how I started my presentation (on the table just giving a little insight into my wine) that could of been much more detailed and a big problem for me was it didn't flow very well from that point when I went back to the presentation. This is because my slides started from the very beginning and I jumped from talking about my wine right back to the 'drawing board' so to speak.
Coming back to the professionalism I actually swore in my presentation, not the worst word but I did say 'shit/shitty' so if I could go back in time to change it thats the first thing I would change. Also, due to time restraints I had to minimise the information I presented which meant a lot of background research was missed out. If I could have more time I would of been much more detailed with my product. To do this I would of added more images of my work progression and detailed information on the slides as well as me speaking throughout the presentation. As it was time wise too much information/images would of been overbearing and I wouldn't of had enough time to get through it all. Another point I'd take for the future would be to have my blog in the background ready for any referencing needed, a main reason I didn't have this this time was because it was unordered which is why i chose to do a powerpoint presentation.

Finally although nothing can be done about it now, my presentation was interrupted by a certain member of staff. Although funny I did think it threw me a little bit on my presentation and I missed out some information. But nevertheless I carried on and I don't think the presentation as a whole was so bad. 

infographics

"Wine tasting is not the same as drinking it. To experience the true flavour of wine it requires you to slow down and pay attention to your senses of sight, smell, touch, as well as taste. Remember - There are no right or wrong descriptions of how a wine tastes or smells. Don't rush the tasting experience."

For my infographics it was a bit of a pain to start with. I was unsure how to give instructions when drinking wine. I mean you put it in a glass and drink it (is the glass even needed?) but, after further research I found a variety of different examples. A very long list of different ways in which you drink wine and how it effects the taste! So I composed an 8 step sheet on how to taste wine.  

I started off with just a basic dark red and cracked on with the information part of the information sheet. I just did it quickly to start the whole thing off and get going with it but I found some aspects I do like. For example, the words wine written in the glass were originally going to be typed not just written with a drawing pen quickly on illustrator. 

I tried out different colours and asked a few members of my class to give a little insight into there opinion, as some of not the majority are included within my target audience. A few options were available, not just colour, but also with or without graphics and a signature of the wines label to link them together etc.  

I decided on three separate wine info graphics for each of the wine boxes I am producing i.e red, white, rose. The same as I've done with the ads and everything else, like each product has it's own mini matching selection. The colours are actually selected to be as close as possible to the box it needs to match. To do this I used the tool to pick the colour I wanted off the packaging and then placed that on the infographics. 

    

After getting the basic layout and colour down I thought it best to crack on with the text. I originally had just written the label freehand and did quite like it. But I wanted it all to fit in with my packaging. Therefore I wrote it all out using the text available on illustrator, changing the height and spacing of the text to fit the logo. With this I also changed the numbering throughout the info graphics because it didn't match well enough to the text. 

Final wine packaging

Final packaging design! Yay!

If I'm honest creating the background was a nightmare I originally wanted to take pictures and then edit them brighter but what I didn't realise is that no camera I had available to me was strong enough to capture the night sky. So I got a rough idea of what I wanted and then used photoshop to basically redraw the picture. I used a variety of different brushes and often changed the opacity and colour. It was quite a drawn out process. I think it could be better with more time changing up little bits or even experimenting with paint for the final packaging and I think in some parts of the image if you look closely it is obvious the image has been drawn but other than that l am quite happy with what I've come up with. 

On the actual packaging I kept all the writing and graphics white much like the logo, so it would stand out against the background I've chosen. I really like the colouring I chose for the red wine as I think it's the most attractive and really stands out to the others as its so bright. Apart from the Nyx logo I kept most of the other text as simple as possible because you needn't draw attention to the unattractive (but of course important) information. The only think I decided to add to the background was the constellations. I did this because it's a key link to the logo name. Through the creation process I kept coming back to constellations and after putting them on the background I really liked it and thought it just added a little something to a fairly simple background. 

Here I've included all the aspects to the packaging that follows through in each different design. The large white wine 'cut out' is exactly what it says. I was hoping to have a clear plastic over that part but still so you could see the actual bottle, as the wine itself is a huge part of my market. This certain cut out would only be available on the larger 6 bottle box. Now for more specifics, because you drink wine there are certain aspects you have to have displayed on the bottle/box to keep within the law. So you will see on this image I've included; drink aware, allergies, storage information, barcode, distribution, controlled appellation, volume, type of wine and the year. These are all aspects that must be visible to the buyer. I kept most of it bog standard, as you would see on any other wine. The type of wine and year I did a little research into such as the place my wine is produced matching with its name. Eg. I didn't want it to be made in France with an Italian name. 

Above you can see a few of the ways in which I created the background. I just used different brush tools that fitted to that section of sky. I think this sky was the easiest to draw as after struggling with the last two I did it a lot more choppy and to me it looks slightly more obvious its drawn over but I still think it looks good.

Once I had down the process of how I wanted the package to look and go, it was fairly strange forward. I say this, that doesn't mean it took me two minutes to whip up. It took a while but I'm very happy with the outcomes. I used the same shapes obviously for the boxes and text just changed up the colour scheme on the sky really. I suppose I could've just changed the colour on the first image I did but I liked the thought of although the colour matches the wine, the background also matches to its sky. If that even makes sense, maybe it's just in my head it does. So anyway, here is my packaging for a bottle of rosé. 

Again, here are my white wine package designs. 

Packaging advertisments

Advertising and promotion!

For my advert I went through a variety of ideas, using a real wine bottle and ink to create a funky looking bottle of wine, different people and poses holding a wine bottle and many others and none seemed to quite fit to my style of packaging. So, I decided to go with what I know best which is the night sky. I went on photoshop and created what looks like a blast of different colours in the night sky, forming something similar to a nebula. I added speckles across to look like stars, much like I did with my packaging. I originally did all this with just different brush tools and a few different colours and then to make it stand out a little more I played around with the brightness and contrast. After that I changed the hue and saturation which gave me completely different colours and enabled me to match them to the different packaging. So the outcome was a different ad for each bottle of wine/different packaging. Once the background was down I just put in a blank black background to make it look like the night sky. Then the next step was typography.

I moved my background into illustratWhen doing the text I'd written a few ideas of slightly cheesy but sky related slogans. I came up with things like 'taste thats out of this world', 'a taste so strong it will make you see stars' and then 'Journey into outer space'. I quickly wrote out the text just to see what it looked like and decided that it suited the page. I went onto 'dafont' and looked at different texts but none really made me think that looked the best. This led me to just using a bog standard font on illustrator - Helvetica Neue, Condensed Black. I then changed the hight and length of the words so it would look similar to my Nyx logo (which is quite a tall text).

Finally I rearranged the text to how I wanted and changed the portrait final outcome to landscape (so I had both for any ads I wanted to place it in). Although its simple and in my opinion doesn't look the most professional I believe it fits well to my product as a wine based on the sky isn't the most sophisticated really, is it?
The image I used was from a series of photos I took of ink dropped into a wine bottle to create my drink. I originally actually did this by accident, I was simply adding the ink so the wine didn't look like water and had a little colour to it. But, upon seeing the slow drop it made and how amazing it looked I quickly scrapped that and had a mini photo shoot. I took a few photos with a white background and some with other backgrounds, and changed up the colour (often adding more than one to create different textures and colours).

Because I didn't want to miss the ink dropping This photo accidentally got my hand in as I was pouring and I found I liked this as well. A lot of accidents happened during this process but none of them bad! I'd say the experimentations were a huge success as it gave me a lot of ideas for my ad and a lot of material to work with. Here I changed up the background from white to a wooden background with a picture of a bar in the background It's hard to see as I placed it behind a frame as I didn't want it to be to bright - I was just trying different things to see how it looked, although it isn't the strongest background the photo of the wine and ink itself I think makes up for it. In the end I got rid of all backgrounds anyway to go against the one I created on photoshop. 

This is the wine bottle I ended up using in the end as the hand and bottle placement and drop of the ink just looked the best to me. I cropped out the rest of the background for my ad and enhanced and changed up the colouring as I went.

Here are my finals ads. 

For Rose wine.

For White wine.

For Red wine.

Finally! I placed the ads that I'd designed onto some images I'd taken when out and about. This was taken during our London trip, and I just replaced the posters already there with my own ad for Nyx, placing all three on the image. I think they work well together but they also work well without one another and don't need the other ad for it to make sense. 

(The original)

This photo was also taken in London, unfortunately it was taken on the trip back home when it was sufficiently dark. Nevertheless I placed my ads on the billboards to get the overall look. I think they really stand out against the darkness and it's kind of suitable for my product anyway. 

(The original)

NYX final logo

I have touched on my logo previously in another post but I thought I'd go into a little more detail. My logo originally started out black, I did this simply when first designing it because it was easy but quickly realised that was not going to work against the type of backgrounds I was going to have. I changed it to white straight away, and then changed the moons opacity so as not to completely block out the stars in the background. 

(The image in the background is simply a place holder and will not be my final image, but it will be similar in colours)

Changing the moon's opacity to better suite the type of background I'm using.

Final logo.

I do like my final logo, i originally just put the moons behind it quickly to use a place holder so I could show an example of where my logo would go but ended up liking the outcome so I stuck with it. It is very simple which has its pro's and cons, I do like the fact it's simple as I believe the simpler the logo the easier to remember and reproduce (take Nike for example) but I also would of liked to create more intricate designs with lots of detail even though I realise that's not ideal or realistic for a logo. 

IDEA - NYX

NYX

I was staring at a blank piece of paper thinking how the H am I going to come up with something that will make a simple bottle of wine stand out?

Theres thousands of different wines and really it's the best brands that stand out but none of them really have a certain theme. So I thought about what I love. I really do love astronomy, you can look up into the night sky and see a galaxy with your naked eye. You can see cosmic structures that are millions of light years across and if you don't think that's cool then I don't know what to tell you.

So the very first thing I did was just start doodling different nebulas and looking at night skies and I just knew that that was what I wanted to do. 

So I knew I was doing an astronomy theme but what sort of name could I use for that? I thought of different constellations and what are constellations normally named after? Gods in mythology! So I was scouring through the constellations, different gods, goddesses and mythology symbols and came up with an abundance of ideas. Looking into each individual meaning I was looking at what would best fit my product. Thinking of this I started to think about goddesses rather than gods as my target audience would be aimed mainly at women. After looking through I found the goddess Nyx.

Nyx is the greek goddess of the night. This clearly fit perfectly with my astronomy idea. Although there isn't much on her when they do talk about her she is revealed to have exceptional power and beauty, so much so she is feared by Zeus himself. She stood at/near the beginning of creation and was one of the very first goddesses. A little into the background of her, she was born of Chaos, with Erebus (Darkness). Nyx gave birth to Aether (Brightness) and Hemera (Day). Later she also gives birth to; Mros (Doom, Destiny), Ker (Fate, Destruction, Death), the Hesperides (Evening, Sunset), the Moirai (Fates), the Keres, Nemesis (Indignation, Retribution, heavenly punishment for excessive hubris), Apate (deceit), Philotes (Friendship, Love), Geras (Old Age), and Eris (Strife).

I think for my target audience it is a great idea to have such a powerful and outstanding goddess as the symbol for my product. Because I'd decided on a name the next step was some sort of symbol to create the logo. When I was researching Nyx I came across a lot of moons (as she is the goddess of night) and decided, the simpler the better (take the Nike logo as an example, so simple but everyone knows what it is without even the name there). So I came up with a full moon and two crescents on either side (after many attempts).

I went through a variety of text styles before finally deciding to settle on one. Because there are so many different fonts I just chose what in my opinion fitted best against the logo. My logo ended up being white and the moons behind the text had the opacity taken down. I had to do this because of the nature of my packaging. The packaging is all rather dark other than the bright sections indicating what type of product it is. I thought it best to stick with white because it did stand out against the background. Although, that didn't stop me from trying and toying with other colours.

I tried other colours (a magenta here) and just didn't think it looked right against the background and didn't really stand out as well either.

Similarities with my logo design

After producing a logo I was happy with I thought it best if I was to check there was nothing similar within other wines. So I did a simple google search and luckily nothing I saw was too similar to my idea. Of course there were a few moons but not with a whole astronomy theme behind the wine. Here are a few examples of what I found (including anything with the word moon in). 

This one although not directly linked to mine as its nothing to do with the moon or wine it did come up. And so this logo (of what product I don't know) gave me the idea of doing something similar with mine? Perhaps the name NYX written in the moon, with a bold colour used also.

This logo is one of the closest linked to mine in my opinion. Partly because I had drawn something similar in the first idea stages. I also like how the logo is a bit rough and looks although its just been sketched out with no tweaks made to make it look sleek and finished. 

This coffee ring mark isn't a logo obviously but I thought I would like to do something like this with my logo. Because the ring is circular it could be seen as a moon and a half of it a crescent moon. I'd like to experiment first with paint, or even coffee (I'm not wasting real wine) to create the rings and see if I can create my logo in it.