Girl Power // Slogan Tees

Slogan tees are a massive trend, especially on the high street this year. A lot of the tees include gender, race and politics. Many of them say ‘’Girl Power’’ and ‘’Feminist for life’’. These tops are an indirect way of talking about these situations, it’s a way of voicing your opinion without saying it out loud and they are also showing a powerful message. Lots of celebs have been seen wearing this trend including Victoria Beckham and Rita Ora:

A way of showing a story through our brand could be like this trend. Insta-activsm is a graphics trend which is ‘’Social- media- savvy creatives inspire a new wave of activist messages with a playful twist’’. This is showing feminist messages in a more innocent way, a way of expressing art. This is visual of what could also inspire our brand identity.

Neon Signs

Over the past few months in particular i have saw many neon signs across visual merchandising and interior design. Neon lights make your head turn, they stand out to you for being so glowing so its a perfect accessory to help market your brand and products. It created a modern, glamorous effect to whatever its added to, whether thats a shop window, your own home or produced digitally and included within your branding.  

Neon signs within visual merchandising:

I really love Patrick Martinez' work, he combines neon within in art to create beautiful pieces of work. '' These phrases, drawn from Patrick Martinez's neon sculptures, capture the artist's sensibility. It is one informed by the challenges, ethnic diversity, and hybrid nature of the urban environment, as well as the proliferation of messages we encounter there. Influenced by hip-hop culture and raised in Los Angeles'' - https://www.artsy.net/artist/patrick-martinez. I love that he's inspired by the things around him and what he loves, this shows through his work as its so much more personally and you can see the passion behind it. Ive been really inspired by how he shows a meaningful message within neon signs but not making it serious, this is defiantly something we could try out when creating our brand identity.

Thank you for reading

Charlotte

Photoshoot inspiration

For our photoshoot, we’ve explored and created mind maps of different shoots we could do. We want our shoot to show how you, the consumer would feel and look with our product. We want the environment, and models to look carefree, happy and confident, and the environment to look like a festival, fun, colourful and bold. Our first idea is to have a studio shoot, extremely prop based, this would include balloons, confetti and garlands, a visual representation of a party. Another idea would be a location shoot, outside in a field on a sunny day with free-spirited, dancing models. We want to do both ideas so we can film a range of clips for the video advert as well. For the film, we want to do a similar concept, showing how you would feel and look with our product, perhaps also showing how you would use our product. Postproduction for both the print and video will be very creative and informative, this will include rough illustrations on top and colour replacement to create a more animated look. We’ve collected a variety of images so we have inspiration for our shoot:

When planning and doing the photoshoot we need to plan the props, location, models, lighting and colour to make sure everything links to our narrative and idea to the best it can. Including props that are popular and in-trend will link with our brand identity aswell as models that are similar to our target audience. This will help the consumer relate to us as a brand.

Thank you for reading

Charlotte 

Are Window Displays important?

Window displays are the first point of contact with customers, so yes they are very important. Window displays are a retail strategy, so if you have a aesthetically pleasing window, chances are it will increase sales. Your window display needs to show who you are as a brand and tell customers what your business does, the target audience/ promotions/ what it sells etc. As a customer to many stores, I know that if a window display stands out to me, I would want to look around. Successful elements of window displays include the store’s appearance, lighting, colour  presentation and themes which bring it all together. Themes tell a story and intrigue the customer, theme ideas can range anywhere from coordinating colours to grouping products for different styles. It's good to consider the store, season, new products, overall look and feel of the brand to have a successful theme and window display. These are a few window displays that have stood out to me recently: 

My own photography:

Valentino- this was the window display from Valentino on Fifth Avenue, this is my favorite display from the images i've included, mostly due to the styling that has a significant impact to the window display. It's a very simple, clean display, however the styling is very bold and colourful which really intrigues me.

J. Crew- the window display for this is fun, creative and playful which suggests it not a really serious brand and is more casual wear.

To conclude, I think window displays are very important. They tell the potential customer what the brand is like, so you can consider it before entering. A successful window display is visually appealing which usually attracts a large amount of customers. 

Thank you for reading

Charlotte

Pink and Red

A trend I've been seeing a lot of recently is the combination of both red and pink, a few months ago if i thought about wearing pink and red together i would've instating thought no and how it would clash. However i am really starting to love it, especially within graphic tees. Its a trend perfect for both men and women to create a cool, statement look; I've personally bought into this trend and so far really love the garments i own, the key i find is to only wear the block colours, combining with a pattern could look extreme. I knew I've saw this trend within garments before, however seeing this report on wgsn proved to me how its an up and coming trend.

''This colour combination isn't going anywhere anytime soon, as Preen included several pink-and-red colour-blocking looks in its A/W 17 collection as well.''

-http://www.whowhatwear.co.uk/pink-and-red-trend

 This trend is massively within graphic tees, like the one above. This tee also shows a powerful message, which means you can show a message without actually saying it. The red text against the pink background really pops and stands out showing the text.

Ive also seen this trend within formal wear like above, i personally haven't worn into this as for formal events and evenings i stick to the dark colour palette. Saying that these outfits above are very stylish and bold, so you'll sure stand out from being unique.

Thanks for reading

Charlotte

Ideas and Creative Concept Exploration

For task 2 of the Fragrance Project individually we need to explore 3 ideas, when we come back with our groups we will them pick which idea is the most solid. I choose to develop The festival glitter, Electric diffuser and mental health bracelet. I have selected a couple of my favourite pages from the booklet to show to you that i feel like explain the creative concept clearly. 

The Festival Glitter

This is the double page spread to show the consumer, the consumer would be a a playful, free-spirited individual who enjoys nights out, travelling and festivals. She loves to get dressed up to express herself and is a massive follower of trends. All the images I've including visually show what this consumer would be like, what she would eat, wear, do and use. 

The creative concept for this idea would be bright, bold and have a graphic style. With citrus being the preffered scent for this product, linking it with cocktails to show the mix of flavours/colours would lead to many ideas for the packaging and photoshoot.  

Mental Health Bracelet

I love the layout i created for this double page spread showing the concept. The negative space on the left hand side, next the the full image of the right equals out effectively. The concept behind this idea was that the increase of mental health issues in this day and age is dramatic increasing, because of this we wanted to create a uni-sex bracelet that has a scent of lavender helping to de-stress you. 

The target consumer would be a secondary school student. A shy, hard working student who gets lonely and wants to just be happy. This band would be minimal enough to be allowed to wear a school so whenever they get stressed, they can have a sniff.

Electric Diffuser

The next concept is a electric diffuser that can be controlled by your phone with a scent that relaxes you. The layout of this page reflects the concept itself by being minimal and peaceful yet ordered.  

This is the creative concept, all the images individually show our brand identity, a relaxing, neutral, abstract look. I got really inspired by crystals, i was doing lots of research and found that having a crystal in your room and reduce stress, i thought a crystal being the diffuser itself would be really effective as it wouldn't only look good but it would also have a reason behind it. As you can see on the left it would be a large crystal shape with the scent inside that diffuses whenever you want it too from using the app.

I now need to discuss with my group to finalise the idea, ill keep you updated!

Charlotte 

Insights and Ideas

For our first task of the Fragrance Project in our groups we needed to have 3 mood boards showing our insights and ideas. We needed  to talk about the:

- Market and Product

- Positioning and Promotion

- Consumers

- Insights to Ideas

To create a clear way of presenting, we decided to make each board and idea and explain each revenant top on the idea board it linked with. This gave us a clear view of what ideas related to what idea.

 The first idea was scented cosmetics, in particular glitter. We say many insights showing how consumers are annoyed how festival restrictions mean they cant take in all there beauty products, especially perfume and makeup due to glass packaging. We also saw and know from experience how festivals are very un-hygienic; and with the restriction of beauty products and the hygiene, this is a problem for many people. Our idea was to combine the 2 together and create a scented glitter make you smell and look good. We also interviewed a makeup artist at glowgetglitter and she was telling us how at festivals and events everyone wants glitter, this proved to us that its a popular trend.

The next idea was linking it to scented jewellery, i saw many insights showing how portable fragrance and personalisation are going to be popular in the future. We had a variety of ideas on the board including a diffuser necklace, a candle with the same scent of necklace inside and a infused stone necklace which you can mix and match. However to make it more unique we thought about incorporating an app with it which controls when the diffuser will release scent.

The final idea was a ornamental diffuser, we wanted to create a piece of art/sculpture that also releases scent perhaps linked to the mood and story of the sculpture. ''Mobile app usage is a daily ritual with nearly 75% of of consumers using mobile apps daily'', ''the top reason consumers use apps is to make life more convenient''- Mintel 2017. This is a insight that made us feel like it would be needed to incorperate technology within it, an app linked to the diffuser that controlled the scent would be original.

Overall we finished the presentation with a mid 2:1 which i was really happy with, a key improvement we need to make is to ''Use key theories and principles to formulate your own arguments and ideas.''    

Thank you for reading

Charlotte