Prickly Pear Bloom

Two design related posts in a row! Wow!

So this is where I talk about the catalog project that rendered my weekend clinically dead, but after which I felt such a sense of relief, it was audible, and I thought I might blow people over with my dramatic exhales.

This was a group project. Blink. Blink. Up until now, almost every thing I have worked on, except for the calendar on which I asked my friend to collaborate with me, has been on my own. Solo. Me. I have developed a style and workflow, I’ve learned to tread within my own timeline and I’ve learned rules and then thrown those rules out the window. This was a complete departure from how I’ve been comfortably living my life for the past few years. In the last three weeks, my life has been a little bit turned on its head. But it’s been good.

First, everyone decided on a company, concepted a catalog, and created a rough comp by hand to present, laying out where type would go, what images would go where, and the basic design style of the piece. We were then assigned to various teams, and within those teams, we presented our roughs and then had to decide whose to continue with. The person whose catalog was decided on would act as the art director of the team. Of course, everyone wanted to be the art director, so it wasn’t much of an easy decision, but finally, we decided to go ahead with mine. I will say that my rough was the tightest of my team, so I was hoping it would be easy to work from. After that, we decided who of the other two people in my group would act as the graphic designer and the production artist. And then we got to work.

I concepted the logo, which went through a couple of different phases before it landed here. I originally wanted to use a hand altered version of Aristocrat, which was the original inspiration for using that font within the catalog, but it just wasn’t working. I was using solid letters combined with open letters that were losing readability at small sizes, and I had used some flouncy ribbon devices that were starting to make it look like the Coca Cola lettering. So finally, I ditched it and replaced the typography with the blocky sans serif here.

There was a teensy bit of a communication issue within my team at the beginning of this process, which made things a bit harder. I left work early one day to meet with the graphic designer to take a look at his progress, but he didn’t show. Which made me a little angry. And then for a couple of days I wasn’t sure if he was going to have anything done, or if he was alive, or what. He finally emailed me, and when we all got together in class things were on a reasonable track, and pretty much stayed there. For the most part, we all worked pretty well together.

It was definitely a little hard for me to let go of some of the control that I am used to having over every little piece of a project, and let someone else do a bunch of the work. He did alot of the design work, based on my original rough comp, and he came up with some graphic solutions that I probably would not have pursued on my own, which is pretty cool. I worked out the main header typography, the order form, and I put finishing touches on the whole piece with a few color choices and graphic shapes as well. In the future, I will probably adjust a few things, to make it work a little better, but overall, I think it’s a really good piece, and I’m proud of my team for all of the work they put in on it.