STUDIO BRIEF 2.
EVALUATION.
I was very happy with the end set of products I produced for this project and felt that they showed great attention to detail and quality, and also showed how far that a response to a brief could be taken to receive the best possible outcome. I felt that with this project I definitely improved my skills in patience and craft, after having to cut, fold and glue 32 different sections to complete the boxes alone. Not only this, the hand done paintings and decision to add extra details via foiling came at a longer project time, and required more patience, than any other purely digital project to digital print I had worked on.
I do however think that there were some issues with craft, however for the most part I felt that these 'mistakes' were out of my hands and mainly occurred naturally just because the boxes were being constructed by hand. Mistakes such as these were mainly at the gluing stages. All the nets shapes and sizes were the same, and cut rigidly on the guides printed, however at the gluing stage it was more trusting instinct where the right places were to glue, how much glue to use and so this altered from box to box, which is why I think some were more successful than others.
In order to improve the packaging I would have liked to have printed onto a thinker stock, not only would this have added and even more high-end feel to the product, it would also have made the packaging much more durable, as I felt the boxes were quite weak to be holding jars. However I knew that mount board was not an option due to the previous project where I had tried to construct a box and it didn't work. I could have improved my stock selection by looking outside college at an online stockist, however due to the number of deadlines and my decision to paint and foil the packaging, I was left with hardly anytime to print, and therefore this is something I would have definitely considered had there been a longer timeframe to complete the project. I would have also made the box created for the tea lights slightly smaller. You will be able to see from opening the Memories of joy box which houses a set of tea lights that there is quite a lot of wiggle room for the tea lights to fall over. Although these would be sat on a shelf in store, they also would have to be distributed via trucks and therefore might displace an unstack during commute. This could be easily adjusted by decreasing the size of the panels for the box.
In terms of things that went well, I am very pleased with the outcome of the foiling. Foiling details onto the boxes was one of the last things that I had to do in terms of designing and was therefore something I had to squeeze into one afternoon. Due to the small timeframe, I didn't have much time for practice, however, being fairly confident with foiling I got stuck in. I wasn't expecting the outcome to go so well as every piece of foiling that I did went right. It can be seen that there are some imperfections on the boxes, however this was down to the fact I was using old wooden screens which had holes in, these were the only ones available at the time and so I tried to correct this by covering up most of the holes with tape. I feel that foiling has become one of my strongest production skills and is something I will continue to capitalise on.
I was also happy with the outcome of each of the paintings, I have not painted since my art A level 3 years ago and so I thought that this would be quite a challenge. However it was something that I really enjoyed doing, and although the pieces took 3 days to complete, it was great to take a break from digital work and do what I used to do best. I was worried that I would lose the painted effect and that they wouldn't come out as well when transferred to being digital, however I felt that after playing around with the brightness of a couple in photoshop, the application for physical to digital came out really well.
I thought that the stickers I produced alongside the packaging to be placed on the jars inside really helped the collection to become more whole and well rounded, I took inspiration from the sticker designs seen currently in the circulation of Yankee candle's which is why I think they were, when combined a successful addition, using a matt sticker overlaid by a clear vinyl sticker to get the glossy finish seen on regular Yankee candles.
Another aspect of the project that I felt helped the collection of pieces really look like part of the Yankee candle brand was the promotional work. Through using a specific selection of colours, familiar fonts already used in the Yankee candle brand and photography over illustrations, I really thought that the promotional work helped to put the packaging collection into context.
One aspect that let down the promotional work was the photoshopping of the posters. I felt that I did well to match the original photos I had taken to the background as this was easy. However, photoshop is not my strong point and so, the images of the boxes, still have some of the imperfections on done whilst crafting and constructing. I would have liked to somehow remove or erase these. My photoshop skills are something I would like to work on over summer so I do not have these problems in year 3.
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