Teaser Poster

As I am now creating an app to go with the campaign, I thought it would be a good idea to make a teaser poster to get the public interested. The poster consists of the bottle designs , the QR code and the title I have come up with for the campaign 'A DUVEL LONDON' I came up up with this after a lot of word association in my sketchbook. Although a very simple name, its very to the point and brings the whole campaign together nicely.

The poster will be printed from any size from A4 to A0 depending on where they will be displayed. For Vedett we have just paid a company to fly poster for us, a similar idea applies for 'A DUVEL LONDON'

I have chosen a type called 'Champagne & Limousines' for the poster and this will stretch across the whole campaign keeping it all consistent. I have used this typeface in Bar Music Hall a few times. Its a very clean cut thin sans that I absolutely love. For this particular poster I have added a 2pt stroke...

A2 Prints

So I have made my main design elements of the project.... The bottles! I did this by placing an image of each brand in Illustrator and using the pen tool to trace around the edges. I have also traced the outline shape of the bottle labels and logos but removing all other element s of the bottle designs. Using a thick stroke and the colour's I selected for each brand I think they have come out really well. They are very simple but very effective and memorable. A very modern take on a very corporate brand.

Originally I wanted to emboss these prints and either use a UV gloss over the ink or a coloured foil on the outlines, this meant that I could pick a tinted,textured board to print on. However seeing as I am only producing one or two of each print and not mass producing them , this is just too pricey. I had a quote of £250 for just one board!

SO.... My plan is to print everything on a lovely matt laminate sticky back vinyl and mount everything up individually onto the right thickness board/paper. This means that for the background I will create my own textured background. I think the outlines need some kind of textured to stand out of/from. I've made a simple grey flecked texture using effects in Illustrator, it gives the prints a canvas type feel with the outlines a smooth colour, it almost looks as though they are printed differently anyway which I'm pretty pleased about!

To Print!

I was lucky enough to visit a massive printing warehouse in Kent. The company is called Creo, here's a link to their website: CREO. My Dad does some freelance work for them, so managed to get me in. I was in there on a night shift from 8pm to about 3am! This is where my prints were produced and I could explore the different machines, papers and be nosey at the whole printing process in general...

As I wanted all of my various prints on different thickness and some single sided, some double sided, they were printed on a super thin sticky back matt laminate vinyl (a kind of plastic). They were printed on a HUGE digital machine mainly all on one run.

I then took to the job of mounting everything individually by hand. This took hours! For the A6's I chose a card slightly thicker then an average postcard. I stuck one row down at a time onto the card. I had to be so careful with this and ended up using a squeegee and cloths. The vinyl is so thin once the backing is off that it easily puckers up beneath your fingers and ends up creating bubbles. This happened several times and it took a good few tries to get it right. I then had to measure up borders and place the back menus on individually. I then trimmed everything down. I left a 3mm bleed on everything and used trim lines in the print files to make sure it was all even.

For the A2s I chose a thick folding box board. A nice thickness to displays the large prints behind the bar in pubs, they will be able to just lean against back walls without creasing.

The standard teaser posters I printed on A3, but they are made for pretty much any size up to A0. These were printed on the same matt laminate but on a non sticky vinyl. So these were very simple and only needed trimming...

The A3 folding flyer was hell however! So, the front of the A3 had been printed on a sticky vinyl and the back on a non-sticky. So I need to peel off the backing and place on the non-sticky surface. This took so many tries for me to get right. I kept placing it in the wrong position or it kept bubbling as the A6s. The vinyl is so so thin which makes it super tricky. I ended up hijacking one of Creo's enormous lightboxes which allowed me to see through the vinyl and line it up properly. After all this messing around though, the 2 sides stuck together made the A3 way to thick to be used as a folding flyer. The first couple of creases were OK ( I made them on the sharp edge handle of a scalpel) The rest however was just not going to happen....

I've ended up having to print the folding flyer on a standard silk A3 white paper from a printers in London. I've matched up the paper as much as I could but it's not ideal...

Of course if this campaign was mass produced and not a one of uni project this would've been manufactured differently. The double sided would have been pressed in the same run without faffing around matching up edges by eye! They would've also been trimmed by machines. I would've had to set the artwork up with a particular bleed and specific margins. Although most large printing companies will do this for you.

I have taken samples of the paper, cards and laminates and put them in my sketchbook.

Adjustments...

I have changed a few things after thinking about the campaign in more detail. I now be designing an app that accompanies the print campaign. The prints will now include a QR code that will take the user to the app. I have also changed the A1 prints to A2, as the prints are to be displayed behind bars in the participating pubs, A1 will be too big, a lot of the smaller pubs just won't have room for them.

Pitching to the boss

I pitched my map idea to the UK manager of Duvel to see if he would be interested in actually using this. I also think its a good idea to work with him as I go along in the project to get some practice of working with a real life client.

He really liked the idea but thought that the public would need some other kind of incentive other than just showing where the different brands are stocked. I suggested tying in food with the map. The idea being that each different brand has several different courses that match with the drink, the participant can visit various different pubs depending on which area of London they want to visit and have a different course per pub. We also talked about maybe developing a kind of tour of London, traveling through visiting various iconic pubs in and around London and tying in information and history of the areas.

He liked the idea of having prints displayed in the participating venues. Also, now I am tying food into the mix, I will need to create some kind of menu that fits in with designs. These will be A6 postcard size with the larger print design on one side and the menu on the other - All the same colour codes as the map and prints...

First Ideas

I want to mainly focus on creating a campaign for print that will cross over various different formats.

I was thinking a map would be a perfect project for this. The map could show where all the various brands are stocked in London. The brands would be colour coded. It would be on A3 paper and in a folding flyer format that could be picked up in the participating pubs and bars. I could produce some larger scale prints that would be displayed in the participating pubs, following the same style as the map.

It will give me a chance to explore the printing process in more depth, research different types of paper, cards & ink and practice my graphic design skills.

Proposal 01

We had to write up a short proposal of out intentions for our independent projects...

I propose to create an original print campaign for the Belgian beer brand Vedett and Vedett Blonde. The campaign will consist of a map, art prints and food matching cards. The map will show all the pubs and bars that stock the brand in London and show routes to carry out a Vedett pub crawl in different parts of town, it will be in a folding flyer format and be finished to a high standard. The map will be available for anyone to pick up in all the stockists of the brand. A series of larger scale prints will be produced that are consistent with the design of the map and the brand itself, these will be displayed in the participating bars. In addition to this there will be a series of food and beer matching cards, which will vary from bar to bar. I will be pitching this idea to the UK manager of the brand and will be getting feedback from the company throughout the project as I would from a real client.

Reading List:
Designing Brand Identity: Alina Wheeler
A Designer’s Art: Paul Rand
The Art of Color: Johannes Itten
Layout Workbook: Kristin Cullen
Maps: Paula Scher
Mapping Patterns of Information: Manuel Lima
The Map as Art: Contemporary Artists Explore Cartography: Katherine Harmon
From Design into Print: Preparing Graphics and Text for Professional Printing: Sandee Cohen
The Production Manual: Gavin Ambrose