Studio Brief 2 - Collaberation. Propercorn

I have chosen to work with another illustrator which is Hannah Graney on the Propercorn brief.

BA (Hons.) ILLUSTRATION/ANIMATION		LEVEL	05
Module Code	OUIL/AN503
Module Title	RESPONSIVE

Name Adele Pierce

Name

BRIEF TITLE: Propercorn

Why have you chosen to work with your creative partner? What are your aims?
I have chosen to work with Hannah because I feel that she has a good work ethic, and is reliable which is something I’ve found is key when working collaboratively; I often end up doing most of the work. I really like her style of work as well and together we could make some interesting stuff. She is good with colour and a range of media such as paint, ink, print techniques and collage. This is something I struggle with exploring. I think also that together we can come up with decisions without arguing over them. Hannah is equally as skilled digitally as I am and often we help each other figure out technical issues so I feel if we face any problems we would be able to figure them out together. We are both pretty laid back but hard workers so I don’t think we will come to logger-heads.
What are your specific areas of creative interest in this brief?
My particular area of interest is the concept; I think being a young fresh brand we are able to be playful and can be quite humorous in our approach to it. I think also the brand uses a lot of line work within their packaging which is something I really enjoy exploring. Hannah could help me to open up with the vibrancy of the colour and collage. I will be interested to see how we can make the propercorn brand appeal more to males as well as females and a broader audience age.
What specific creative skills do you have to offer in relation to your chosen brief? How do you intend to use them?
I think that I am good at coming up with a strong concept that we can run with. I keep things light hearted and funny which will appeal to the correct audience for this brief. We will both approach the drawing of the illustrative packaging and then decide whose works best. I will then aid the colouring of the packaging whilst Hannah works out an interesting composition and other formats. I am also pretty good at typography styles and hand written text; which is something I will apply to the flavours of the packets for example ‘Sour cream and chive.’

What specific non-design skills do you have to offer in relation to your chosen brief? How do you intend to use them?
I am good at decision making so I would be able to pin down what I feel works well and ideas we need to scrap. I think that I am good at time management so will be able to organise us concisely. I think also communicating with clients, if we need to email anyone for information I could take on that role. I am pretty laid back and fair so I won’t take the limelight and will share the roles equally.
What will your specific roles be in the collaboration in relation to your brief?
I will come up with the concept, Hannah will thumbnail ideas to get all of our thoughts onto paper. I will then decide which one will work best to appeal to the audience more. I will email Propercorn for more information if needed. Hannah will come up with composition of the pieces and the correct format. She will explore how our idea would look on posters, billboards etc. We will both experiment drawing the outcomes to see who’s line work suits best and which media to use. I will explore this initially by hand in fineliner then scan it in and colour it digitially. We will print out various versions of the packaging and ask peers/friends/all ages which they prefer. From this we will decide which to go with. Hannah will decide which colours work best for the product. Between us we will colour them and use collage if necessary. I will hand write the flavours. Hannah will put everything together on Photoshop making sure the composition is right. I will see over the final designs making sure everything is correct. Hannah will submit them to YCN on the correct date.
What will your individual responsibilities be in relation to your brief?
Research, creating a concept Decision making Colouring Drawing out ideas Emailing Organising
What will your joint responsibilities be?
Research Asking others which design they prefer to get an idea of the audience Deciding on which of our drawings work best Colouring of the images Ensuring the work is uploaded to YCN Organising our time Sharing the work load
Please sign below to acknowledge your agreement to this collaboration.
1.  Adele Pierce	2. Hannah Graney

Creative Partner

Choosing to work with Hannah Graney, fellow illustrator

We came up with the concept of playing on the 'Proper' notion of the brand. How do you do things properly? The right way? What if you do things the wrong way, will you have Propercorn to then fall back on? We liked the idea of saying ' Whatever you do, do it properly with propercorn.' We decided to look at humorous ways you could do things wrong. 

We thought of the things you have no choice but to do right, like riding a bike, brushing your teeth, cooking.

My ideas

• upside down umbrella
• piece of cake with a slice cut out in the wrong area
• animal with its head stuck in a cat flap - the wrong kind of animal like a rhino or something
• picking up a can the wrong way - drink spills out
• wearing underwear on the outside
• hoovering the grass
• going through a drive through on a horse
• upside down toothbrush
• camouflaged face against a white background
• someone fencing with an actual fence
• swimming on a pool table
• wearing a scuba suit in the shower (overcompensating for a situation)

I think it would be important to keep the theme of our message with the flavour like any water related ideas to mesh alongside the sea salt and vinegar ones etc so that the colour would work (blues).

I also emailed Propercorn for some free popcorn so we could taste what we were representing but they haven't got back to me. It says on the brief that if you email them with your address they send you some out, still waiting.



Contextual References

Packaging - Illustrated & hand written text

Combination of photography and illustration

 Collage

 Vibrant digital collage

I really like this style, the linework of the drawings combined with handwritten text

 Vibrant and playful composition

Typography - hand generated

How to represent flavour

Popcorn

Experimentation of colour and text

I came up with these boards to show Hannah so we could work out whether we wanted to mimic propercorns original handwriting and colours or come up with our own kind of style. We both agreed some of the colours needed changing and that we should go for a more tall capitals kind of typography, still hand-rendered. From these we will decide on one background colour and encorporate the other colours within our illustrations.

We finally got our freebies delivered, a free box of popcorn with a handwritten postcard to say they were looking forward to seeing what we came up with!

Grouping colours together, do they work as a set?

I picked out which colours I felt best represented the flavour then tried grouping them together but they didn't work together. I was also trying to bare in mind that Propercorn said they appeal more to a feminine audience; and want to chose a group of colours that could be seen more unisex.

These I feel work the best as a set so far

I created a questionnaire to see which colours people think work best as I couldn't decide

I started to draw up some ideas to show Hannah

TO DO :

• Consider how audience reads packaging, what goes where, what we focus on first in terms of layout, reading left to right etc
• Consider how minimal the linework has to be in order to fit the aesthetic
• Explore how the linework alone works with just one colour, then add limited colour and compare
• Experiment with the popcorn image, how can we trim it down so it is not taking up 1/3 of the packet
• Explore more image ideas - Hannah to simplify the ideas to one object maybe? One stand alone image, more about shape than line? I think line is important though as they use lines a lot within their brand. When recieving the free popcorn the box had line drawings on it, and the hand written postcard was filled with line work on the front. I think they would be more impressed with this than shape. 
• Start putting ideas together for the pitch board 

I follow Propercorn on instagram and noticed that they changed their layout yet again. 

This works better for our imagery as it frees up more space

Basic layout

Pitchboards

Hannah put together most of the pitchboards in terms of layout and I included my ideas to the thumbnails and the colour and packaging board. We emailed back and forth our edited versions to keep updating them

Thumbnail of final ideas

Communicating between us

We have been using Facebook as our main source of communication, messaging back and forth to arrange to meet up

 We also emailed back and forth bits that we were working on. So for instance, I would work on the linework and then email it to Hannah and she would experiment colouring it. Or Hannah would work on a background layout and then email me the template and I would add the designs to it to see if they suit.

We also posted onto Pinterest our reference imagery and shared the link between us which saved us sending images back and forth

Some days we felt we needed to be in for a full day together other than a Thursday so we would arrange to meet up. Hannah was good at creating a plan for the week so she would say to me ' Okay so what shall we do for next time we meet up?' Then we would decide who could do what, and what needed to be done before the day we met up again. So for example if we were in on Thursday, we would work on some drawings or thumbnails leading up to Thursday, then meet on Thursday and decide which thumbnails worked and which didn't between us both.

We decided that Hannah was best at thumbnailing ideas. I was best at choosing which of the ideas worked. Hannah would then go away and explore compositions. I would then take her composition and draw it up properly as we decided my drawing style best suited the aesthetic they were going for. I would send my designs to Hannah and she would add the drawings to the layout that she was working on.

As the drawing was a key factor, whilst I took my time on these, drawing and re-drawing, Hannah made a start on our proposal boards.

Communicating with Propercorn

Hannah pointed out to me that we needed a proper version of the logo from the brief to work with so that it did not become pixelated. However, as Propercorn keep changing their packet designs, it had updated since we had been working on it. This meant, it had updated since they had uploaded the brief to YCN also. 

We had based all of our ideas around their new layout. We needed to get in touch with them to send us their latest logo so I took on the role of emailing them. 

However, when logging onto the Propercorn website, I found that they don't actually have it up and running yet - just social media sites such as Twitter and Instagram. The only point of contact I found was something that said email to cass@propercorn.com so HOPEFULLY they will recieve our email in time and get back to us with the relevant logo. 

Drawing

When I layered some of my drawings together on Photoshop, playing with the composition through scale and rotation I noticed that obviously scaling down some of the drawings meant they appeared more detailed. I have decided to print out my compositions and then re-draw them so that everything works equally, the line quality is the same, the detail is the same. Also some factors of my drawings I was not happy with so decided to re-draw them. Others such as the firehose putting out the candle, simply did not work compositionally on the packet design so needs to be reconsidered and re-drawn.

Trying to figure out composition once I'd drew the image.. I think this candle one needs re-drawing because the arm needs to be more on the left, and the candle may be too tall, the water needs to spill out more. I'm glad I did this and figured it out before I stuck with that drawing to add more detail to.

Hannah found these illustrated popcorns on Propercorn's instagram page. We felt they work much better than photoshopped images of real popcorn as they had used previously. We have played around with how much popcorn we want to include. If we include more popcorn, it means that the illustration has to be simplified down otherwise it will look too busy. If we use few, spread out, we can add more detail into the drawings through line work. 

I also played around with how dark the lines could be by adjusting the levels on Photoshop, this also will depend on how much popcorn we use, the darker the lines the more in your face it is. I think maybe we need to print off a few versions and ask people their opinion. 

 I think this kind of thickness seems perfect for the line work. Hannah pointed out that the older logo might work better, minus the white box, so this is something we have also played around with.

How do I think were getting on?

I think we seem to be getting on as a team fine, we communicate often enough on what each other are working on which is the key thing. The only problem we have is that Propercorn keep changing their designs and their flavours which we have to keep up with! But between us, we are fine. I think Hannah has took on more of an organising role which I initially thought I would be doing but she seems to cope better with making a plan whilst we have all of our other work running alongside this module.
I think we come to decisions pretty easily and neither one of us are scared to say when we think something isn't working right.
Hannah must get frustrated with me because she works hard on planning compositions and I'll just say no to them but I think this will pay off in the end. We share the work load equally I feel too which is something I haven't experienced when working in a team before. Usually I take control and do the most work whereas this time (as I expected) Hannah is a really hard worker.
We established my linework suits this brief best so what is nice is that I can get on with the drawing side of things while Hannah is more digitally skilled than I am so she can get on with creating the layout and putting together the presentation boards. I think we have been lucky that we match so well and have not clashed in any way.

Something we've messed up on 

Both of us failed to realise that Propercorn posted new flavours onto their Instagram page 4 weeks ago. Back when we were deciding on how we could link flavours to a colour scheme and funny ideas associated with the flavours, we missed 'Sweet Ginger & Orange' and 'Sour Cream & Black Pepper'
This has really thrown a spanner in the works because we can't now go back and change all of our ideas now that we are just finalising the drawing. We can just hope that Propercorn like our proposed ideas for the original flavours? We do feel it was unfair of Propercorn to put a brief onto YCN asking for help then continually changing their package designs. We noticed just downstairs in the cafe they sold one of the original flavours with the layout of the popcorn all around the edge of the logo, minimal illustration, alongside one of the new flavours sour cream and pepper, with a more spaced out logo and popcorn, more detailed illustration. How can both be running at the same time? Propercorn seem confusing to us.

Flavour typography - hand drawn 

I re-drew out the type for these flavours then emailed them to Hannah and she added them onto our layout

In order to keep them all the same size I used a copy of the last one I'd created underneath the new one I was making. I used the ruler on Photoshop to guide me and made sure that the pen was 17px for all.

Communication

Propercorn luckily emailed me back with the updated logo. I sent the link to Hannah and she added it to our layout

Reference

We tried out Hannahs hand initally for holding the fork image, but her hand looked too feminine and as we wanted the character to be wearing a suit to make it seem posh and 'proper' we asked a male in our class to pose for us so that we could use his hand as reference instead

Scanned in images

Final Designs

Colouring

I experimented briefly with adding colour to the images as Propercorn use a lot of white within theirs; however I was pretty rubbish at it so I asked Hannah to have a go as she seems to work better with colour than I do. I helped her chose the colour scheme though, and sometimes we disagreed but we asked others what they thought in order to come to a decision. We decided not to add white but to add one block colour of a darker shade or sometimes a lighter shade just to add more depth to the images and draw your attention to the most important objects.

Final Outcomes

Proposal Board

As Propercorn are into their linework I created this border idea for the boards which looks pretty good

Final Boards submitted to YCN

Crit feedback

• Thought effectively on why you were making your decisions
• Really like the continuous border, creates a strong set
• Great edible colours and whites
• Really fun and looks professional
• Witty and works well, suits propercorn
• Good uniformed ideas, all flow together, can tell you have thought about how the products would look together as a set
• Designs do compliment the flavours whilst still being interesting choices of imagery
• I like the boarders! Looks really professional and is really nicely presented too

Project Report