Cosmilk
Our first Narrative unit project was a marketing project. My product Cosmilk is a caffeinated milk that hopefully will become a substitute for energy drinks. I am marketing this product to people who are young and would describe themselves as “in need of energy”. These people are more likely to be young adults and teenagers. As a result my demographic is people in their teens and through their twenties, so essentially young adults.
If I were doing a magazine advertisement I would use the bandwagon approach since teenagers and young adults care the most about “fitting in” and looking cool. I would also use Ethos to make the characters in the advertisement show how “cool” Cosmilk is. Since the milk also comes in a glass jar they can also be “cool” by showing they care about the environment, and if they return the bottle to the store then they can get some money back.
In creating my logo and label I created many different sketches to start, then it all completely changed because I thought my logo symbol would be a mini milk carton but when i did a sketch with a comet I liked it so much more so it became the center of my logo. In the process it was suggested that my design was too formal so I slanted the top and bottom boxes to make it more fun and less rigid. The font was also super hard to find, it wasn’t until Ms. P sent me a link to a website with space themed fonts that I was able to find the one that matched my logo design best. I also initially struggled with making my outlines in order to use live paint in Illustrator. I missed part of the instructions but after going over it again I knew what I needed to fix.
After making moodboards we then started to design our labels. Then after we made the labels we changed the pixel sizes and put them onto real mockups of products such as tshirts and tote-bags.
We Weren’t Supposed to be Heroes
For our second project we were tasked with designing movie posters. Not simply for a movie that had already been made or was in the process of being made. But a movie in which we were the main characters. It could be in any genre and have any plot. The only catch was that it had star us as the protagonist. While looking on Instagram I had seen the movie poster for Call Me by Your Name, despite having seen the movie I really enjoyed the pastel blues and the overall simplicity of the poster. As a result I decided to model my own poster after that one.
Since I decided to make my movie a coming of age story about several teenagers turned essential workers during the Coronavirus Pandemic. I wanted the poster to reflect youth being on the cusp of adulthood. Eventually the teenagers embark on roadtrip as kind of a last hurrah of childhood before leaving for college. I used my real coworkers names on the poster to sort of ground it in reality and while the colors used were a bit darker than Call Me by Your Name I think it ultimately came out very well.
“We Weren’t Supposed to be Heroes” came from my experience as an essential worker. I work in a grocery store bagging groceries and other menial labor. In “Heroes” Lauren, Kelly, Brian and Julia all work together at Draeger’s Market. While older customers lament the loss of their youth, summer approaches and it’s almost time for the four friends to part ways and head off to college. Instead a spur of the moment road trip begins where the four friends learn that wherever they go from here at least they had fun on the way.
To create my poster I used Photoshop to layer the two images that I took with my camera. I revealed parts of one by using a vector mask and brushing with white to reveal the background. Then I added some adjustment layers to make the composited image look less like a photo and more like art. I also added in a Gaussian blur to focus the poster around the doorway in the middle and make the overall detail less overwhelming for the viewer. Getting the exact pictures I needed for the poster proved to be somewhat difficult because I could not find any substitutes for what I needed on a stock website. As a result I had a friend take the pictures for me while I was in them. I used my friends as stand-ins for my coworkers since they were all out of town when I needed the pictures done.