OUGD 503 - Individual practice - YCN brief research and development

For our individual practice we were asked to choose one main brief from either YCN or D&AD. Going though the briefs a few of them caught my attention but I eventually decided on the YCN Cath Kidson brief.
The first thing we did in the first session was to dissect the brief and really get into which parts mattered and what to focus on when we start to design for the brief. After reading through the brief I found what it was asking for was very straight forward but the target audience was very narrow, I felt like the brief was actually tailored to one specific person. This is the brief.

After going through the brief I felt to know the brand was key to this brief, although the actual outcome is very simple I didn't feel this brief would be particularly simple in terms of research. I decided to ignore the target audience because as it was a print i was creating I didn't feel it necessary to really focus on this aspect. To an extent it is important but it is a much smaller consideration when you consider the already existing prints they create. The basic gist behind the brief was that she was a modern british woman.

Looking through the already existing Cath Kisdon prints I could see a very obvious theme between colour and subject within the pattern, I felt for this brief I wanted to do something different but in doing this it would have to still fit with the existing product range, which was requirement of the brief anyway.

My initial research mainly focused around looking at the existing conversational prints along the range, some of the prints were really nice that followed a grid that wasn't immediately obvious. The colours used were muted and not too over the top, in the brief though it specified that they're own prints used bold and distinctive colours, I think this is true about some of the prints but most use quite un distinctive colours. Aside from looking at Cath Kisdson prints I started to look at wallpaper prints because I feel these can really fit the conversational aspect of the brief. 

Wallpaper prints
This site, Timorous Beastie has some really nice printed patterns which fit quite well with the brief, there are some that represent London that fit with the British side of the brief and some that use birds in them which gave me the start point for my first print.

After researching printed examples I pulled together a list of British subjects I could focus on in this brief. 

I wanted to look at - 

cities 

camping

British wildlife (birds, fox's, badgers, squirrels)

pets (dogs, cats, fish, horses)

seaside

countryside

British food (pies, fish and chips, full english breakfast)

I liked the idea of using wildlife/animals for the brief because I felt it played on the british element of the brief. I started looking at British wildlife, in particular species of British birds. I found some old books in my house that was a guide to British bird watching so it was a perfect reference point to use when creating a print. 

I started by scanning in some of the pages from the book to use as the basis for the individual elements of the print. For this project I chose not to go with hand drawn illustration as I felt all of the Cath Kidson prints I had seen looked very computer rendered but with a hand drawn look to them, the way I could achieve this same look was by using the pen tool in Illustrator. 

As a reference to background colour I used an already existing print to see what the birds would look like with a background. After arranging the birds on a grid I felt they looked too static and might have benefited from something else in the background. Instead I decided to chop them up and switch between the different elements to create an entirely new bird. My though process behind this was to represent a british eccentricity.

I felt the colours fitted quite well with the existing range if not a little bit understated, I was pretty happy with this design but I didn't feel it immediately reflected the British aspect of the brief which was something I wanted to have a main focus on. I tried different variations of this print, but eventually I put it down to development. 

Off the back of this work I decided to be more playful with the prints I was designing. I thought about looking into food specifically for this print the most British dish of the them all, a full english breakfast.

I think this is something everyone can identify with in some sense. 

I think as a repeated pattern this works much better than the bird pattern i think the colours also reflect the Cath Kidson brand well, For the conversational side of the brief I think something that is more playful like this would be ideal for what they are asking.

Realising the potential that I had with this brief I started to do some more in depth research into the british theme. As I had previously listed British pets was one of my focuses I wanted to explore. The most common pet in the UK is a dog so naturally this was something I wanted to focus on, I did research into British dog breeds and I chose out the most distinctive and well know.

I also looked at existing prints involving dogs and some from Cath Kidson, from what I could see nothing really caught my attention so I felt this was a good subject to pursue.

I liked the layout of some of the dog prints but I felt they lacked content and could do with something extra to bring the whole thing together 

All of these dogs have a strong British pedigree and I feel they are very relevant to this brief of all things british. In illustrator I used the pen tool to take the most distinctive yet simplest features of the dogs to give them a hand drawn yet clean look to them. 

Colour was something I had to take into account for this brief as well, no more than 12 colours were allowed to be used in the print and as some of the dogs contain several different colours in they're fur I had to be clever about using the same colours throughout the range of dogs. The colour of the dogs I felt was important because some of them are defined by the colour most related to that pedigree, for example the Airedale or the King Charles. 

In terms of layout I drew experience from the other prints I had created and also already existing ones. Overlapping an image from one edge causes the tile not to look too repeated and breaks up the pattern to create an overall more natural image, using this technique it makes a pattern look less gridded. Helping this is the shape you use for the pattern, I feel a hexagon is perfect because it can be repeated easily and also gives a good area to work within. The brief outlines for submission that 3 different colour variations should be handed in, for the variations I changed the background colour and the colour of the balls in the image.

To add some extra content to the patterned image I thought about things relating to dogs, I looked into dog beds and bowls and dog toys. I thought about the conversational aspect of the brief and decided to set a scene revolving around walking dogs and meeting in the park. In terms of the pattern having continuity I feel I have achieved this.