Tuesday 19 May 2015

OUGD603 - Extended Practice: Crackers (Development)

Initially, this brief was a live brief and I had been approached by a family friend to design some crackers for their business. There is more information posted on my PPP blog, but in the end I had to design some crackers which were absolutely hideous and I was not pleased with what so ever, but the client loved them. I approached them with the idea of a nutcracker cracker, he absolutely hated it and said that we had gone 'from zero to hero' from the nutcracker to the end result - extremely rude.

This simply pushed me to develop my initial idea which I thought was really well designed. I wanted to prove to myself that I am capable of designing successful crackers which could be sold in places such as Harvey Nichols or even Harrods. I felt so deflated after the feedback I received, and all of the abusive emails, that I was determined to make this brief into one of the most successful ones. 

As I had already spent a lot of time on the development of the crackers for Marigold Gifts, I managed to reach the final design quite quickly for this brief. Although I struggled at first to find motivation with feeling so flat. 


These are some of the ideas I had for the contents of the crackers.


This was the initial cracker estimate which was rejected and I was only paid £250 for my time.



Below all of the sheets are fairly self explanatory as they have all been annotated.




These were the initial designs I did for the musical cracker live brief. I was really pleased with this design. However, now that I am designing this for myself, I am going to change it a bit and remove the musical notes and change the theme of the crackers completely.









I also experimented with these colours to see whether some colours which aren't typically related to Christmas would work. I think they do work to an extent but they aren't as successful as the red design.





Rather than having just one design repeated six or eight times, I decided that I would design a family of nutcrackers. The idea of each one having an individual identity makes the design and overall set of crackers more special. The crackers that were initially designed for Marigold Gifts were going to be sold for £29.99. I didn't feel as though the crackers I designed were going to sell for this amount, whereas I think mine would. 


Below are photographs taken from the development process. They took quite a while to make them
































I took great care when folding the crackers as well as the box. I wanted to make sure that the ink wouldn't crack on the exterior as I am aware that this can easily happen.













I decided that I wanted to design the cracker box in a bit of a different way. I didn't want to simply produce a rectangular box and instead wanted something a bit more special.

This is why I designed the box to look like a nutcracker's drum.

I went to Sydney Beaumont and bought some clear plastic and folded the edges to form a pentagon.





The plastic was then glued to the base of the box using double sided tape, and the edges of the plastic were glued together using super glue to ensure that it stayed together.




I had to punch holes in each side of the lid so that the gold rope could be fed through it and ask as a handle. I am really pleased with the outcome and it has turned out exactly as I had imagined.


The top of the box has been designed to be as simplistic as possible.


The bottom of the box has been designed to inform the customer of what they can use their cracker gifts for as well as the inclusion of a bar code and warning information.





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