The tea party to end all tea parties.

Finishing the tea packaging assignment was one of the greatest achievements for our class so far in 2010.

It was one of those things that just seemed to go on forever, but in a good way. Starting with the 6 thinking hats of Edward de Bono and learning how to apply them to our design work is something I will now use in everything I do. then moving onto the logo design and selecting one which we could carry forward into different flavours and combine it with practical packaging. Then we had to work on the colour ways for the packaging designs that worked with all of our kinds of tea, the logo and would be attractive to the consumer. Choosing a special event that our tea was involved with was also tricky and did take considerable thought and changing of many a-coloured hat. Finally we were to design a package closely related (but not too close) to our original designs.

This is what I came up with, my tea brand name was ‘Mr Tea’, the logo was just the name in Bosnia extended, kerned in a particular way to make it distinctive. The types of tea I chose were black tea, white tea, rooibos tea and breakfast tea – in no particular order. The packaging was to be attractive to the gift and novelty market and to people with a sense of humour, or just want to have something special, nice to have or a conversation piece. The special event was to aid in the research and with support for people suffering from prostate cancer, having a fictional seminar here sponsored by Mr Tea – everyone attending the seminar would receive a special 2 pack of tea in a nifty little promotional case.

Here are the pics I have taken of my packages:

 

Adobe CS5 Roadshow

The Adobe Roadshow to promote the new CS5 suite was in the city in Brisbane, another student and myself went along to see what they had to show for themselves. It was well presented and organised with all the speakers happy and working to a tight schedule. They kept us entertained by communication one on one with the audience and bribing us to join in by giving away many a rubics cube to people with good suggestions or correct answers. Of course the free coffee was great too, nothing like a room full of designers with free coffee, looking at more than 250 new features that are going to make their work of design, print and production easier, faster and more efficient.

The biggest news of the entire event, aside from all the small but important improvements, for Adobe would of been the release of the new Flash Catalyst which is intended to facilitate the work of designers with regard to creation of interactive content. “From now on designers will have possibility to create expressive Web application interfaces and design interaction without writing code.” It seems to be simple enough for designers familiar with photoshop, illustrator and indesign to transform their artwork and images created in these applications into interactive user interfaces in

 

More Tea?

If there is no limit on the amount of tea that I can blog about, here I go again…

Mr Tea needs one more flavour to add to the collection that I had written about in a previous blog, I did have full intentions of having the black tea as my “special occasion” tea and just using the other three (breakfast tea + the 2 new ones) as the regular teas but I do like even numbers and sometimes just can’t stop myself when I’m having fun. I think it is also great to just do a little extra incase something is not working out in the end and you then have an emergency back-up without experiencing the whole ‘end of world’ scenario. So I now have a range of 4 regular teas: black, breakfast, roobois and white, leaving me to make a completely different package (and flavour?) for the special occasion tea.

 

Wine and Song

It may seem unusual to be so deeply involved in wine and song in my design blog but, yes, we got to have fun. This blog also involves work from 2009 when I was studying in the certificate 4 level of Graphic Design at Kingscliff TAFE.

This time I will be showing you the CD packaging and the wine labeling, the CD packaging was left up to us what music we decided to feature on the CD and to work the style of packaging design around the style of music. This would be how it would happen in the real world anyway, I suppose. I chose to make mine for jazz music, modern jazz but with a smokey feel and I spent quite a bit of time on the internet listening to jazz music to get just the right feel for the cover and graphics. Eventually I landed on a theme and knew what I was doing. I created a concertina fold for the case and a small poster for the center with the details of the tracks on it, then the CD design

 

Pop-Out Cards

Various occasions require the subtle beauty of a pop-out card, not many occasions, but when they’re required they are definitely required and there is no substitute for a good pop-out card. In the course I took in 2009 at Kingscliff we did learn about the ancient art of pop-out card making and it’s something I dived into with relish, savoring every carefully folded moment. Yes, I enjoyed it and if I got to spend the rest of my life working for a pop-out card company creating corny pop-out cards for special occasions I would be deliriously happy.

 

Packaging for fun

Some of the packaging I have worked on in 2009 in my Certificate of Graphic Design at Kingscliff TAFE was fun and innovative. When I began the packaging subject I was very unsure about what I was doing and how to do it. Logically packaging works if the measurements work and I was good at drawing plans and measurements etc, so I knew logically that I could do it. I was determined to design my own templates as that is where the design part comes into it isn’t it, it just didn’t seem right to use a package template that someone else had used and just design a logo to go on it, so… here is a couple of my packages from 2009. Package, colour and logo designed and placed by me.