Week 1 UK Greetings.

The project that I chose for the Live Brief Phase 2 is the UK Greetings given by You Can Now Student Award 20/21. The reason why I chose this project is because the brief immediately sparked my interest, and also because last year while I was doing my DPS I had a hard time finding a job, I believe the biggest problem was my inability of getting my artwork commercially available, this project is a brilliant opportunity for me to both expand my knowledge and have something for my portfolio that will make me employable.

My move was to print out the brief and carefully look into it, so I will know what I have to do. They want me to create a collection which will include: 2 greeting cards, 1 boxed notecard set, 1 gift bag, 1 repeat pattern for gift wrap, 1 notepad cover of any size. The style they ask of is broad, from classic to graphic centred. The tips given to me are on point and clear, I honestly love how clear the instructions are. Here are the notes I took:

The package the UK Greetings gave me is not supposed to be used other than to give ideas, so I will not be able to place them here, but from what I gathered UK Greetings is an extremely popular card distributor, with the ability to be fancy, but at the same time to be something you will be able to buy in a supermarket. The wide choice gives me comfort that they will not fully disregard any work submitted.

To start I wanted to know what they do in better details, I visited their page which then led me to their Amazon page. While browsing I come to discover that the Graduation section of greeting cards was poor and sharing the space with the cards to congratulate passing an exam, I mean no disrespect, but I would not personally buy them.

With the knowledge of lacking graduation cards I went a bit wild with the ideas that popped into my head: I wanted something funny, something that I would want to buy. I believe this might have been a mistake by my part as I did not complete the research first.

The brainstorming looks a bit bare, but this time around I could not think properly in words, so I decided to create extremely rough sketches of the ideas:

The little dragon:

This imagine gave me an idea of a joke about hibernation, which I found so funny that I began to work with it:

For some reason even this comes to mind:

Although the hibernation joke was just too funny for me to pass on, and the fact that perhaps dragons do not actually hibernate, I looked into animals that do.

And the ones that are UK based.

Though the hedgehog might give mix feeling as they are associated with autumn, as for the Door Mice, I just do not like them much.

This was inspired by both the UK Greetings’ watercolour collection and Peter Rabbit.

What’s next?

I believe my next step is to take a step back, I need to evaluate who my audience is first, I cannot let my gut instinct go wild in this project as I did in the one before. I also need to keep an eye on what I need to do, and by next week I need to know all the sizes of each product, for example: the size of the notebook and the swatches for the repeat pattern.