Fudge Kitchen; colour re-think.

I've not worked on this brief properly for a while now and when I had the crit on the logos with foil the feedback was that people really liked the bronze colour. Originally the colours for packaging were going to be based on the colour of the logo but seeing as I'm going for foil, I've decided I need to re-think the colours I am going to use for the products. Although I really like the purple, this is well known for being Cadbury's colour so I maybe need to steer away from this. The green is also something they have utilised as a company before and because I want to refresh the brand, this is probably best not to be used again too. I quite like the blue/green on the left because I can't think of a product that uses this specific tone within the food industry. It's quite a warming blue too and it's neither masculine nor femanine. 

I've also looked at how the idea of the bronze foil/colour is going to work on this blue/green colour I've gone for. Although it's quite hard to see the logo at the moment on this, I need to print this page out and actually test the foil properly on top of this because I'll get a better idea of if this works or not. I've also started to look at colours I could use that will work on this dark background for other information/text that will need to be present on my packaging. I need to go for something that either compliments the background colour or the logo design. I will get a better idea of which colour to use once I make more design decisions about the style of the products. 

Nail Varnish; test prints.

I've done some test prints of the single nail varnish packaging to see if this works and if a nail varnish actually fits comfortably inside it. I've taken a few photographs to show how the design is going to work realistically once I've printed it properly so this includes showing the inside of the packaging and how this would look etc. This was also a good test of making sure that the grey's I've used are working because I know they are quite light. When I did the first test print (first four images) I realised it's really diffcult to read the tag line on the packaging so I went back and changed this on all the products I had already designed to a darker grey. This will definitely show up when I come to printing the final outcomes. I also realised after the first test print that the packaging needed to be slightly longer and wider in order to it to close properly at the top because although the packaging just about shut, it made it look a bit untidy. The last image in this set is the refined larger packaging and this works a lot better, although the nail varnish probably has more room than really it needs, the whole concept works perfectly and looks a lot neater. I need to go back now and resize all the relevent files because I've got three versions of this packaging.

As well as doing the mock ups, I also did a few test prints on the actual stock I'm going to use which is card. I noticed a few mistakes on the actual designs as I was doing this. These were things like, the logo could do with being a bit bigger on the single packaging, the 'bright and bold' wasn't in the darker grey on the first bag print out and I also tested foiling to make sure this worked on the logo. The foiled bag was an A4 one that I originally intended to mock up but then I decided that this would be ridiculously small and wouldn't actually fit the packaging in it anyway. 

Nail Varnish; bag design.

The swatch booklet then inspired the design of the bags the products would come in when consumers purchased something. Although this is quite hard to see because I've made the outline grey for the purpose of print, I know this net already works because I've used it in previous projects. The idea of having the branding central is again, based on the swatch booklet and the fact it can be quite large. It would also be foiled on the gift bags when they are printed for a high quality finish. I've included the website on the back of the bag because it's not really massively significant that it's on here with it being on the other products but it is there if it needs to be found. The bag would come in two sizes based on the though that I'm going to have two different types of packaging for multiple nail varnishes and single nail varnishes. I need to do some test prints to confirm the size of the bags.

Nail Varnish; swatch booklet development.

As a consumer of nail varnish I've always wanted something that will show the whole product range by a particular brand so I thought as part of my brief I would design a nail varnish swatch booklet to show what is available within the new brand I am creating. 

I already had an idea of how I would like this to look in my head. I've come up with the fold in swatch booklet idea in a kind of leaflet format so everything would fold into the middle. In terms of applying the branding this was quite straight forward because I want it to be quite large on the front and foiled so it made sense to have it central. I've also included the website on the part which will fold into the middle so that when the consumer opens it, the website is the first thing they should hopefully see. I chose a square format because I thought this could be quite small and everything would fit comfortably inside this with not much space left over. 

In terms of the layout for the swatches I made this square grid which the colours could be added into. This might change depending on the colours I select for each category. 

After I'd selected what I thought would be a good range of colours for the matt collection I realised that the grid I had originally created now didn't really work because there were more colours than grid squares. I tried this portrait and landscape within the booklet design but neither really worked because there was a lot of white space around the edges. 

I then decided to lay the colours out like this so that they fit into more of a square grid format and filled more of the space within the square the matt colours are going on. I've chosen quite a few tones of different colours as examples for the range because matt is the original nail varnish colour and consumers like to have a lot of options. 

I then moved on to the metallic range where there are less colours but some of the more popular ones that I'm familiar with within existing brands. I've used pantone metallic colours swatches for this to emphasise the fact they are metallic colours because you can tell with them being a bit darker.

And finally the glitter range which I wasn't really sure how to tackle in terms of representing this in print. I decided to create a swatch of circles because effectively this is what glitter nail polish is and the consumer should easily be able to understand this. The glitter range is again smaller but like with any overall range, this is a starting point so if it were a real brand obviously each range would get bigger over time. 

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This is the currently finalised design for the swatch booklet. Although it's quite simple, I feel it does the job and fits the vision I have for the brand. Due to the fact I want this product to be high end but afforable, I feel that a lot of high end products tend to use the view that less is more and have quite clean cut design like this. The fact theres so much white space also ties in well with the teaser ads so this is definitely something I'll keep consistent throughout the rest of the products. I chose matt, metallic and glitter as options for products within the range because these seem to be the most popular within the industry based on my own knowledge. The fact each range gets smaller in order in the booklet works quite well too because theres a heirarchy. I need to do test prints of this booklet just to make sure the design really works. 

This is the line you can see under each range in the booklet. The colours would be named based on which range they are from for example, matt and then 1 to how ever many there are in that range so that the consumer could count the colours from left to right to find the one they would like purchase in store. It seemed an easy method of naming them instead of coming up with crazy names other brands seem to have which may be copyrighted. 

Nail Varnish; receipt holder.

As a subtle yet further sophisticated touch to this project, I have designed a reciept holder because usually when you buy a high end product, you get something like this to go with it and this links nicely to the rest of the branding. 

Nail Varnish; packaging.

I've decided to design two different types of packaging for the nail varnish products. Single packaging to hold just one bottle of nail varnish and a larger version that will hold three. The packaging is based on some research I did before I really got into this brief and I really liked the idea of it folding in at the sides, kind of like how a gift bag does because this makes for quite a high end looking outcome which is what I am going for. The single packaging would be themed around the colour of the nail varnish that goes inside it and I am utilising the same pattern as the wrapping design so that the inside doesn't look so plain and the two elements link together. The name would also be included on the back so the consumer knows which it is if they were to purchase it again. The larger packaging would just be grey on the inside because you can't guess which three colours the consumer would choose and there would be so many different conbinations but this links well again, to the wrapping design. The idea of the packaging is that it would be used if someone bought the nail varnish as a present as a further form of gift wrapping it. Although the packaging contains the branding, the person recieving it might not know what the product is and the gift wrap would conceal this initially. 

Nail Varnish; wrapping paper.

I decided to design wrapping paper for this brief because I thought that if consumers were going to buy this as a gift then they could opt to have it gift wrapped like most high end products tend to offer. The other usage for the wrapping paper is that if someone is buying the product for themselves, the product would not come in the gift box so to add to the fact they get a quality product, their nail varnish would come wrapped in gift wrap. The middle design in the issuu document is the one I am going to take forward and the idea of having the squares darker is to remind me once this is printed, which squares to foil because I want to add this finish to link to the logo.