OUGD504 - Augmented Design - Printing/Production Methods

Playing Cards

My Order

Due to time constraints, I had to upload my playing card design to be printed today, but I didn't have any other thoughts on it in the two days since I last worked on it, so I'm not too concerned about this being a problem. 

I ordered 2 packs on 310gsm linen finished paper, as that was what the website said the standard quality was for playing cards. I ordered in a white window tuck box (shown below) as the packaging option as it showcases the design well as well as being a cheap option.

Commercial Considerations

Having looked at the prices the website charge, using this website on a large scale probably wouldn't be cost effective. A few potentially important price points are shown below.

250 Packs - $1,000 - £640
500 Packs - $1,625 - £1,040
1,000 Packs - $2,700 - £1,730
2,500 Packs - $5,000 - £3,200
5,000 Packs - $9,000 - £5,760
10,000 Packs - $15,000 - £9,600

Exchange rate as of 21st December 2014

I would imagine that the most cost-effective way of producing them would be to send them to a commercial printers, receive them in an uncut sheet form, and then use die-cutting to cut them up. 

Menu and Recipe Cards

My Examples

I hope to be able to use the digital print facilities for my menu and recipe cards, as this is important due to the precise nature of some of the vector images. Rather than printing the background directly onto the stock, I've ordered some samples from G.F Smith that were closest to the colour of the background I was using, China White and Mist. I ordered them in 270gsm, as that and 350gsm were the closest weights they had to the 310gsm I ordered the playing cards on, and given the delicate nature of the menus I went with the lighter option. 

China White

Mist

If they don't end up printing as well as I'd like them too, I'll print them one some white stock that they have in the print facility, but I'm hopeful that the China White paper will work well. This will mean I'll have to prepare the documents for print both with and without the background colour in them so I'm ready for either scenario.

Commercial Considerations

Had I been producing this on a larger scale, I doubt I'd have used a higher-end stock such as G.F Smith because of the cost, and would probably have used some stock that the printer use as a standard to keep costs down. This would cause me less concern over the stock colour because I would expect to have less problems with the consistency of the printing of the background colour with a commercial printer than from a digital printer. This would allow me to use white stock, which I would expect to be cheaper than coloured stock.

OUGD504 - Augmented Design - Playing Card Development

From producing the menu cards, I'd created quite a lot of vector images of toppings that I could use, and I felt that I should incorporate at least some of them into my playing card for some consistency. 

I initially started off by using the same sort of style as the recipe and menu cards, but it became clear at quite an early stage that this wasn't the route to go down. It looks more like a book cover than anything else.

Looking back at the websites that sold different packs of cards, I noticed that the backs of cards tend to be more decorative than anything else. I used the vectors of the raspberry, tomato, pear, peach, chilli and grapefruit to create this pattern. I left out the honey, maple syrup and bacon, because the size of the card lends itself to a 4 x 6 grid, and these 6 toppings have in common that they are food in their natural food, so it kept a pretty obvious concept throughout them. Whilst, visually at least, this is an improvement, it no longer looks very pancake-specific, especially without my logotype. Whilst the style of it works with the menu and recipe cards, it wouldn't be fit for it's purpose without them putting it in context.

To get round this I made a vector of a pancake that I could use in combination with the others. I think this works excellently on a conceptual level, as it shows that the main thing is pancakes, but everything else can go with them, hinting at what the website is about.

I put this into the website and this is the preview that came up, I'm happy with it, but I won't be ordering it yet for a couple of days in case I have some other ideas.

OUGD504 - Augmented Design - Final Recipe and Menu Cards

After producing another of both the recipe and menu cards with different content in the same layout, I discovered a slight problem with them both.

Recipe Cards

The header text on recipe card was too low down, which meant that any letters with a descender would interfere with the text below it, so that had to be moved up slightly. I also found that any topping which required a third ingredient meant that the text sat on top of the egg box vector, so I had to reposition the egg box slightly further down the page. The two are only slightly different, and visually it is only noticeable because of the different heading text. I think the extravagant curves in the typeface cause a clear enough to difference for it to be noticeable, and because it's only a minor difference, it causes intrigue as to if there are any more differences, which encourages interaction. 

These are my two final recipe cards, they will be printed back to back.

Menu Cards

The only problem I found with my menu cards was that some of the pancake toppings required 2 lines of text instead of 1. I remedied this by only using 3 lines of body copy for those examples rather than 4. I also realised I'd not put the web address anywhere, and after experimenting with a couple of positions, I decided that it worked well at the bottom of the page as it split up the border a bit, making it look slightly less geometric.

These are my final two menu cards, which will also be printed back to back.

 

OUGD504 - Augmented Design - Playing Card Research

Existing Cards

I looked online to find a few examples of decks of cards that have been designed with a specific them, given that this is what I'll be doing. I found some pretty interesting ones, and the variety was a lot wider than I expected. There were two websites which I found particularly useful, www.artofplay.com and vandacards.com.

This set of playing cards was designed by a printers. The suits were replaced with CMYK and the numbers were replaced with tints. Whilst this is a really cool concept, given that my cards will have a wider audience than these, I will probably stick to the traditional suits to avoid any potential confusion.

This set of cards was designed purely using typography. Personally I feel that this is a bit of a gimmick, and the lack of a recognisable shape for the suit would probably make them difficult to play with. The back of the cards are quite classy though.

These cards were designed to test the limits of how much can strip back a set of cards before they become unusable. The contrast between these and the type-based cards shows the room for creativity in designing playing cards.

A lot of novelty playing cards revolve around a simple theme. My favourite example was this bacon themed pack. I just think that it's got the exact right tone of voice for what I need. It's not serious by any means but it still advertises its cause well.







Card Printers

Printing a few packs of cards, cutting them with consistency, and packaging them is a big job, and I don't think it's something that's achievable in the time scale I have, especially given that I'm not in Leeds at the moment and so my resources are very limited. Because of this I looked into websites that can make a custom deck for you.

All the sites I found were American based, which means that the shipping time could be a problem given the closeness of the deadline. I have decided to use MPC, as they have the following benefits.

• No minimum order, which keeps my costs down.
• Lots of options for print finishes and packaging.
• Video guides, so there's less chance of me going wrong, which is important given that the time scale I have will probably only allow me once chance.
• The site has been partially funded through Kickstarter, which gives me more confidence in its credibility.

The only drawback of this company is that I can only design the back of the card, not the fronts. That said, I don't think it would be feasible to design the front of the cards within my timescale anyway, but I plan to mock up a couple to show how they would look at least.

OUGD503 - YCN - J2O - Evaluation

General Comments

After the Royal Mint brief, I wanted to do a more corporate brief as I feel like this module offers me the chance to have a go and a variety of different briefs. I didn't want to pick a dull company like Santander, and so J2O seemed like the obvious choice because of the bright colours.

Successes

I think the main success in this brief was that my research was pretty in-depth, by which I mean I think I gained quite a good understanding of the sort of thing J2O were looking for.

I also think that I achieved this, albeit by going against one of the briefs key requirements which was including the green. Weather this can be considered a success is debatable for this reason. That said, it is still debatable that the green is still included as I didn't change the bottle top, which is green.

Changes

I very much went into this brief with the attitude that the green was horrible and I was going go change it. This attitude definitely affected my mindset throughout the brief and made me approach it in a pretty negative way.

I took on this brief quite hastily after getting a bit worried about the considerable time period between the completion of the Royal Mint brief and the start of the next brief I was going to do. I quite heavily underestimated the size of this brief at this point and should probably have taken on a different brief instead.

Going Forward

Whilst I'm happy with how my outcome looks without the green, I'm not happy with how it looks with it, but feel I've reached a point where this brief is reaching a dead end for me. For this reason I won't be spending the extra time to prepare this project for entry as I don't feel there's any possibility of winning and the time could be better spent elsewhere. I do intend to create physical mock-ups of my design for my own satisfaction, my Responsive submission, and for my blog, as I feel that I've spent too much time on this brief to justify not having an actual final outcome.

This brief has taught me to not jump in to making rash decisions or making big decisions too quickly. I'm disappointed that I didn't enjoy this brief more, and it's been quite eye-opening as to how difficult being a designer can be if you're not enjoying the work. This can only be gained through experience, and I'm glad I've found out so soon.

OUGD504 - Augmented Design - Menu Card Design Decisions

Size

I experimented with folding some A4 paper into various sizes to get an idea of what sort of size the menu card should be. In the end I decided to go with a non-standard size. I felt that it should be taller and thinner than any of the standard sizes. I decided to go with 74mm x 210mm, as this is the same total area as the recipe card, which means that you can fit the same number of these on a page as you can the recipe card, which would make for a simpler printing process.

Grid

Because of how thing the menu card is, it was clear that I should stick to a single column. I started off with the same 10mm border as the recipe card, dictated by my web style guid, added in the heading at a size I felt was appropriate, then split the remaining space into 3 equal rows, causing a 4 row grid, where the top row is slightly taller than the others.

Text

I started off using 12pt sub headings and 10pt body text, the same as the recipe card. After some experimentation I found that using 9pt body made the edges of the text a lot neater, as well as providing a slightly larger area for images to be placed in, so I decided to stick with 9pt. It's all centre aligned as that was a feature in a couple of the menus I looked at that I thought worked well. 


Colour and Images

I decided to use vectors again for continuity, but I made these ones slightly neater as they had to look a bit more modern, I took inspiration from the vector images I saw in my research. I stuck to the same 4 colours as my recipe card for continuity, but I used the darker brown less sparingly to make the images softer so they didn't take too much attention away from the text. I stuck with the light background because I thought it worked well on the recipe card.

Border

I experimented with using a border as I had used one in the recipe card and I'd seen one in used in the thinnest menu in my research. I found that having the curvy border clashed with the simplicity of the rest of the menu. I found that using a plain 1pt light brown border worked the best.

Changes To The Recipe Card

After considering some of the decisions I made in the menu card, I re-visited the recipe card to make some small changes to improve the continuity. I made the body text 9pt, which makes very little difference, and I changed the border so it matches the menu. I think this makes it less prominent, which is probably a good thing. The main change was the size of the heading text, which was reduced to 48pt (ampersand to 30pt). This makes it the same size as the heading text in the menu card, which I feel is probably important given that they're going to be printed on paper that has the same area. I don't think this makes it any less noticeable straight away.

From Here

I'm very happy with both my designs. I will be using the same layouts to create an alternate version of either which I can print on the back, to make both of them double sided, as this provides further interactivity. I'm happy that from here I can effectively design the rear side of a playing card using this sort of branding.

OUGD504 - Augmented Design - Menu Design

I looked at a few examples of menus online that each have their own selling points as a style of menu, and each have a different way of selling themselves. They have assured me that the format should be vertical, either in one or 2 columns.

Printing or etching on a different material can provide an ornate look, although the price or practicality of doing so isn't something I'm sure is appropriate for a large scale campaign.

Using a modern style of vector could help appeal to a more modern demographic of people, but doing so generally means you don't use a lot of colour, which might compromise the continuity of the campaign and the website. 

Having a matte finish gives a print a more upmarket and high quality feel to it. Having a mid-toned background such as a silver/grey also allows you to use white ink to highlight certain areas, which isn't something you get using a white or light background.

Using a script font with lots of extravagant curves and little flicks with centre alignment is the stereotypical way that a menu looks. Lots of whitespace, a simple border, and a lack of images put the focus on the text.




















This menu uses full bleed images to sell their food visually rather than through the design of their menu. Because of this the rest of the menu is pretty minimal, with nothing that draws your attention away from the images other than the logo.

OUGD504 - Augmented Design - Recipe Card Design Decisions

After adding the content I decided that the plain background was a lot nicer than the gradiented one. I feel that the gradient is too distracting to the eye when you're trying to read the instructions, and the contrast between the colour of the images and the white at to bottom of the gradient is too strong, whereas having a constant background colour that is used within the images makes the contrast a lot softer.

Text

When I originally started working with the content I tried sticking to the style guide I produced for the website for means of continuity, but it was naive of me to think I could religiously stick to it as it should be obvious that if your smallest text size is 12pt, you're not going to fit much body copy on an A6 spread. 

For this reason, the lists are at 10pt, which is the size I tend to use for body copy, the text under the title is 12pt, which is just big enough for it to be noticeably bigger, whereas the column headings are 18pt so they're big enough to draw your eye straight to it after you've read the main heading. The main text itself is 56pt, apart from the ampersand, which is 36pt as I didn't want it to be as tall as the capital letters. This sort of ratio looks nice, and those numbers specifically work well for the grid, as shown below.

Images

Like I suggested in my research post, I wanted to keep the images quite quirky to make the tone of voice less serious. The egg carton and pancake stack are vectors I made using photographs as a starting point. I placed them in the corners so there is a visual balance between the top and bottom of the page. The whisk was place where it is to break up the space between the columns, that was a free vector I found on the internet that I altered.

   

Border

Having looked back on the examples I found, I saw that a few of them had borders, which I feel give them a more feminine feel, which is something I haven't particularly concentrated on. By experimenting with the idea of using a border, I feel like it has this effect on my recipe card too. 

I also think that having a border may be necessary in the context of it being on a fridge door, as there may be plenty of other things on the door, and having a border around this that frames it will make it more noticeable.

OUGD504 - Augmented Design - Recipe Card Grid

Using the sort of layout that my research suggested would be appropriate and the grid of my website as a starting point, this is what my first idea for a grid is. It uses the same size gaps as the website, but because the page is only A6 they look considerably bigger, which needed to be addressed.

I changed this by halving the size of the gaps between the boxes, expanding the larger boxes to fill in the gaps that were no longer supposed to be gaps.

After this, I decided that the gap between the two boxes at the top wasn't necessary due to the nature of the information that would be going in those two boxes, which will be stuff like how long it takes to make, how many it serves etc etc, so I merged them together.

Doing this makes the layout look a lot simpler on a basic level, and draws more importance to the ingredients and directions as they will be the only information that will have a defined horizontal column.

However, this gives me a problem when considering colour, as the top two boxes will span an area where the background has two different colours in, so I experimented with a few ways round this.

None of the above options really worked, I think it was due to the use of block colours, something which none of the recipe cards I looked at had. By removing the boxes completely there is less contrast, which instantly makes it look softer. I will still use the same grid, but it will just be less defined.

I could use a gradient background like this, where the colour starts to fade as it goes down the list of ingredients.

Or I could use a plain coloured background, I would have to use a tint of the colour that I have been using though, to make it look softer, something like this colour.

I think both options are feasible, I'll come back to this and decide at the end.

OUGD504 - Augmented Design - Recipe Card Research

I looked online to see how most recipe cards tend to look. They all make clear that their should be a clear separation between the ingredients and the directions, as well as giving the recipe a name, and a guide to how many people it serves. Most of them have quite a mumsy feel to them, which is a good starting point, although I will be looking to incorporate a more innocent feel to them to make them more relatable to children as well. They all look to be in an A size, probably A6, and they're all landscape, which I find interesting, as I'd have thought a portrait layout would've been more suitable given the list-like nature of the content, but most of their layouts create a portrait space for the ingredients, which makes up for this.

   

I found the above two on the same website, and it should be noted that the back of the card that I will be designing will be less important for my design than these two given that the intention for it is to be stuck on a fridge. They both have the same basic layout, a smaller column for the ingredients on the left, with a larger column for directions on the right, leaving space above for a name. This is a format which reoccurs in lots of recipe cards, and so is probably the sort of layout to go with.

This one is a lot more rigid in it's layout due to it's lines being a lot more pronounced, this gives it quite a geometric feel, which is odd because of how it contrasts with the style of the main heading text, this is something I'll be looking to avoid.

The big open spaces left on this one are something to consider, as not having the restrictive lines on them might make it more child friendly to interact with, as their handwriting may not be able to fit between lines at their age.

I think the quirky style of illustration on this card is something I should take forward. It has a child-like charm about it that would be suitable for mothers and children. I do feel that the textured background is irritating and something to avoid.

OUGD503 - YCN - J2O - 4 Pack Packaging

Being happy with the bottle branding, I moved onto the 4 pack packaging. I started off on the front, and wanted it to be simple like the branding for Old Mout Cider, which I believe has the same sort of audience that J2O is aiming at.

I started off by making some vectors of the 4 fruits that are in the drinks, as it said in the considerations that depicting fruit has increased sales in the past. These are what I produced. I only used the two colours from the swatches for both the mango and the passion fruit on this post, and colours that were 50% tints of them for continuity purposes.

   

   

I then combined these with the colour scheme of the text from the bottle neck as well as my new logos for each of the drinks, and made a very simple front design. Having seen how the fold in the front affects how it looks on display in the shop in this post I thought it was important that all text should be below the fold to make it clearer, especially given that some of it will be in yellow. I used the big space above the fold for the logo because of this, which then left a natural gap for the images to fill.

The lack of information on the front meant that the back was going to be quite text-heavy. After some experimentation I managed to get all the text that was on the original packaging, as well as some that was on the original bottle neck, to fit in a column with a hierarchy that fitted the following order;

1. Logo
2. Images
3. Nutritional Information
4. Other Flavours
5. Contact Details

I feel that the layout works well because of this, and am confident that this is the order of importance that the content should be listed in. For the nutritional information I used the same shape and format that I did with the calories on the bottle neck, but colour coded them in a traffic light system to show what was good, average and bad. The colours for these were the yellow and red that were specific to each flavour, and the green is the green that J2O is synonymous with, which further backs up the positive connotations of the brand.

After I placed the two in the template, I added the logo into the middle, slightly smaller, and made sure that it was facing the front of the packaging, as it is important to note that my packaging only works with the front facing forward, whereas the old packaging didn't. I also made it slightly smaller to make it look in proportion to the space it is in. This is the final result.

I feel like they definitely show my initial influences, which is always a good thing. The two flavours have only slight differences between the two of them, similar to Kopparberg. The style of the images has a quirky fun feel like Brewdog, but the content is clear and appropriate like Innocent. 

Following on from what I said in my last post, this is how they look without the green. While the hierarchy loses a little bit because of the loss of the green, I think from a wider design point of view it is justified because of how much simpler it looks.

I personally feel that without the green the influences show even more as it looks a lot slicker and has a more grown up feel to it like Shloer and Appletiser. I feel that these are two brands which have got their branding spot on for the market J2O are trying to get into, and so this is a very important factor.