General Comments
The WWF brief was really open ended. It may have seemed quite restrictive in the sense that it had to be aimed at 14-24 year olds and there had to be a digital element, but it's more the arguable that the best way to reach that audience is through a screen rather than print.
I initially came up with the idea we followed for this brief by myself before Christmas, but thought that given the potential for it to become distasteful, it'd need someone else working on it with me so that their were two judges of what was acceptable and what wasn't. Jamie was the perfect person for this as he and I tend to have very different approaches to design, so could see the project from two different points of view. He also is more comfortable with Illustrator and AfterEffects than I am, which will benefit the project greatly.
Successes
I'm really pleased with this project in general, and I've really enjoyed. It has been constantly evolving through conversations between Jamie and I about what we should be doing and how we can make it fit the brief.
We definitely managed to do the project tastefully, there's nothing too obvious about any of the innuendo and none of the imagery was needlessly phallic. When I at the final physical outcomes, they look like they belong to WWF even aside from the obvious use of their custom font and logo. Little details like placing text over images rather than above or below them, and having a fairly minimal layout which places emphasis on the images really help this. This shows a clear influence from our research, as we knew that novelty condoms really imitate the look of their subject, and we knew exactly what WWF's look was.
The strategy behind the promotion was well thought through. We knew a viral video would be appropriate because of the innuendo-based and unorthodox nature of the product, but targeting the younger end of the age range directly was difficult as most of them don't really have a need for condoms. Jamie and I both identified that when we were at secondary school condoms were given out free if you wanted some and were a key focus of sex education. Rather than giving out condoms to schools, the idea to give out vouchers for condoms was really good because it's a lot more commercially viable as vouchers are cheaper to produce than the condoms and packaging (and not many of the vouchers would actually get redeemed), whilst still providing information on the cause on the voucher.
Most importantly, it works. When Jamie and I were in the studio cutting out and folding the physical products, other people on the course, people of our age, the age of the target audience, picked them up to look at them because they take a different approach, which caused them to read the information on the back and interact with WWF.
Changes
Retrospectively, maybe we should have specified on the packaging that it was made from 100% recycled materials to help back up the ethical strength of the project, but given that we only had a small area to work with this would have come at the cost of some of the information about the Living Planet Report, which was clearly more important. This isn't a big issue though, as the recycled packaging is mentioned in the video.
Logistically speaking, I wish we'd booked two print slots rather than one, as this would've allowed me to print my design boards on the recycled stock, which would've been a nice touch to finish this project off with, although at this point this is still a possibility depending on the availability of the digital print resource tomorrow morning.
We found assembling the 6 pack boxes quite tricky because of how thin the tabs were in relation to the weight of the paper. This meant that using super glue proved difficult because it seeped all over the place and dried quickly, and double sided tape wasn't as strong as we wanted it to be. I'd re-think the structure of the box in future for this reason, although I suppose this is more of a prototyping issue, and wouldn't be as big a problem in industry because of the more efficient processes used.
Going Forward
I've found that, by co-incidence, some WWF feature in some part in my work for COP and Design Practice 2, so the confidence of knowing that with really concise research, a professional looking outcome can be realistically reached is great.
Working with Jamie has introduced me to a knew way of working and given me first hand experience of working alongside someone who works less logically and systematically than myself can only prove useful, especially given that most creative people tend to work in this sort of way.
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