After Andrew Nedimyer’s talk I was inspired to begin collaborating with some of my Design classmates I admire. Dunham has a good eye and a lot of skill with Illustrator. Last week I spoke to him about getting together to work on a project. I’m hoping to mock up/improve a brand and create some packaging and marketing design we can showcase. While I haven’t zeroed in on exactly what product it will be yet, I see two viable routes: One is to redesign the packaging for an existing product we both like, the other option is to create a fun imaginary brand we can play around with. Both have their advantages and disadvantages; an existing brand offers design language and content that can easily be built off of, but is limiting in possibility, a made up brand offers a lot of freedom and room to have fun, but without a grounding element it could be a nebulous task.
All things being given, it would be realistic to get an idea together within a few weeks, have some roughs mocked up after 6 weeks and refine it to an end goal by the end of two months. I give it a generous timeline because of the challenge in balancing school and personal projects, along with the inexperience we have in doing these things.
The project would require conceptualizing the brand identity and design language. What is the brand? Where do we want to take it? What color palate will we use for the lines of products? Fonts? Imagery? What is does the packaging look like? What can we achieve within this scope? How do we divvy up the tasks? To give a broad overview, we should come up with a concept, a plan of execution, a timeline and divide the tasks. Our stretch goal would be to get some tangible packaging out of it by the end.
Theoretically the project could be free, but were we to look into getting some things printed out, merch, etc. This would perhaps take a few hundred dollars, a realistic price range for us students.
I’m excited and inspired to start collaborating with some of my classmates I admire and building something neither of us could build on our own. The idea of perhaps creating an imaginary, maybe even ridiculous brand sound like a ton of fun and I hope to get started asap.