Recently a design student came to me with a questionnaire to assist them in a college project relating to their graphic design course and I was of course happy to oblige.

You may find their design project questions and my subsequent answers interesting:

Design Brief
• To design and make a suite of promotional items to help promote a new mobile phone network
• To create a unique, vibrant corporate identity which will appeal to and satisfy my target audience
• To successfully advertise a mobile phone network so it can become a trustworthy, esablished comapny that will attract potential customers

1. Are there any particular mobile phone networks you like promotional material from?

AMANDA: I haven’t seen much in the way of promo material from phone networks, in terms of paper based marketing materials so I can only really go on their websites. In which case I’d cite Three (www.three.co.uk) as having the most attractive and compelling website and brand identity.

It’s my opinion that they are the first mobile phone network to make any sort of attempt to be ‘different’ from the others in the way their image is presented to the world.

Second runner up would be Orange, they make a sincere effort with their branding and attempt to differentiate also from their competitors: www.orange.co.uk

If you look at Three it’s almost like they’ve tried to be opposite to Orange. Orange branding is centered around a colour. With Three they deliberately don’t have a specific brand colour; they only have a brand icon … but it’s colourless or shows up in many different colours.

2. What do you think my main considerations should be when designing a logo/corporate identity?

AMANDA:
- Ensure it is practical; not too tall compared to it’s width or too wide compared to it’s height, not unreadable when small, that it can work well in grayscale as well as colour, and that it can be printed onto nearly any item …paper, metal, fabric without it again becoming unreadable or hard to make out the graphic.
Remember when designing the actual graphic and accompanying text that make up the logo design, they need to be exceptionally neat/tidy/flawless … imagine any errors that might show up on the logo if printed as large as a billboard sized. You never know…

- Ensure that it appeals to the intended customer base and is created with them in mind rather than your own (or the clients) personal preferences.

- Consider longevity and try to avoid being too ‘fashion or trend’ influenced with your design style. What looks good now, also needs to look pretty good ten years from now with ideally only minimal tweaking required to update the design.

- Try to be original and avoid cliches for the industry type you are designing for. For instance if a building firm; an illustrated building as part of the design is a cliche ….. unless of course you think of an original/unique way of presenting that building within the design that you haven’t seen elsewhere. Being as original in your ideas as possible also helps protect you against the chances of infringing on other companies designs.

- Before you start designing ask many questions of the client about their business as it stands, where it may be going in the future and who they will be selling to - you need to find out who the ‘target market’ are and a bit more about that market and their habits to ensure that the design is appealing to them.

3. What do you think makes a successful corporate identity?

AMANDA:
- Those which stand the test of time, are original/unique, are memorable and striking.

- Those that make it easy to remember the company name and ideally give some sort of hint at what the business offers also: this is perhaps less important for large corporations with huge marketing budgets who can use advertising to make themselves memorable, but for the small business owner it’s fairly important that the logo image spells out what is on offer from that business to at least some degree. Or at least hints at it.

4. When designing promotional materials for a mobile network, do you think either stock photography or illustrations would be more succesful?

AMANDA:
- I think either, or a combination of both are fine. Illustrations work just as well for a corporate business as they would for a smaller business or family/child targeted business.

If you look at Hed Kandi music albums for instance they heavily use illustrations within their marketing, which targets adults and not children. So as mentioned, corporate brands can use them even when targeting adults.

In fact if you visit Jason Brooks portfolio web site you will see that nearly everything he does (all illustrations) are targeting adults. Illustrations are perfectly appropriate in this instance. Photos can be used instead to great effect also, as I said, either are fine.

Or they can be combined, as in the case of Brand Nu - who uses a relatively new (and yet heavily saturated now unfortunately) design style of merging photos with illustrations.

5. How do you think I could appear different from existing mobile networks?

AMANDA:
By thinking of a mobile phone target market that has not yet been exploited fully, creating a ‘niche business’, targeting this market only and then your branding would directly appeal to this market and hence be different from the others.

I suggest you target ‘Tweens’ who more and more of now have mobile phones of their own.

Tweens: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preadolescence

6. What are your first steps when designing anything?

AMANDA:
If it’s a logo design for some reason I always have to pick out the font first before I do anything else. Then usually it’s colours next before I start even thinking about the graphic. Not to say that the font or colours won’t then change later on as it evolves.

No particular reason for this order of work that I can give a logical answer for, perhaps just a habit I’ve got into.

For other design projects my first step is usually to gather together a mood board of sorts - I put this all together on the art board within my design software. Which usually involves the logo to be used, images relating to the style I want to convey, and photos and images I’m thinking of using within the project.

7. Where do you get inspiration from?

AMANDA:
From everywhere really, but these sorts of places mainly I’d say;

- Advertising (Some adverts in magazines really inspire me and I sometimes stare at them for some time deciding what about them is so good)
- Fashion (Fashion often influences my colour palettes and patterns)
- Other Illustrators inspire me (I learn from their style, from their techniques and so on)
- Movies (opening credits often feature very interesting designs, look at the amazing start of Casino Royale, I was blown away, if you haven’t seen it you must)

8. So far what has been your favourite piece of design work?

AMANDA:
Just one!! ?? Garrrghh…that’s too hard so I’ll have to force a few on you. These three/four below are my favourites:

This illustration below:

This logo design below:

My full brand identity work (logo, web, stationery, and more) for Love in the Afternoon below:

Now those three above are one’s that I’ve loved for years and have so have ’stood the test of time’ in my affections (often I love something but get bored of it after a few months)……. but below are some snippets from a confidential project that I can’t show full images from, and I think this may also become a firm favourite of mine.

This entry was posted on Monday, January 12th, 2009 at 9:23 pm and is filed under Design Projects, Thoughts on Design. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.