Branding and Product Identity - Studio Brief 04 - OUGD405

As I have chosen to brand my own coffee company that only supplies coffee if the farmer gets equal profits as the retailer, I have chosen to have a look at a few other examples that I could take inspiration from and maybe improve the rigidity of my own peices. 


Current Examples:

GAWATT COFFEE SHOP

I really love the use of browns within this piece. It really shows off the natural colours coffee creates and you can instantly tell that is actually is a coffee brand. The logo is great, it gives off that home made, authentic feel with the wood texture overlayed on the type. I like the idea of using a round logo to symbolise the world and a coffee bean, no corners will make it look softer and more approachable.
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'Prototype No1' also uses brown and neutrals within its colour swatch. I think this is the best route to go down as it creates a sense of ethics within the company, and generally, I think it would work more than any other colour as it relates to the subject in question. I like how this person has used different kinds of bags to brand and based it largely around the use of brown paper, which I plan to do. This meaning that the brand supports recycling due to most things being sold within a coffee shop are almost always requiring a paper cup or bag/box of some sort.

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I picked this out mainly for the logo, as I said earlier I wish to relate the logo to the world as the brand will be supporting the coffee farmers more than any other source so this would represent a fairer global coffee economy.

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Chose this one to be a little different. As you can tell he uses mainly white/black/brown, the colours off which I wish to use. But the person chose to back it on this bright cyan background. My first guess is to make the product stand out but in my opinion I think it distorts the brand and creates a bit of  confusion as blue is not the colour that is associated to coffee.

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'Grounds' coffee is a great example of using pattern and very little colour in identity. I like the use of the invert on the cups to keep it interesting. The brown paper bag just oozes simplicity, with a pattern on the side to relate it to the brand it would be instantly recognisable to anyone walking down a street for instance.

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Adding a little splash of colour is Dorigenn coffee co, they have used bright colours to represent the country of origin which I think is a great idea for my concept. Using different creatures on the front relating to nature I think it's a strong identity as it is really eye catching compared to using browns and neutrals to convey the product. 

Magazines - Studio Brief 03 - OUGD405

The basic process:

1. Concept or Idea
2. Content and Image
3. Design and Layout
4. Gather materials and required equipment (Paper, binding material, printer)
5. Test Print
6. Fix issues within the prototyping
7. Final Print
8. Publish
9. Distribute
10. Promote

That is about as simplified as I could have made it, of course it isn't that simple when you look more in depth. Like does the content inform? Is it for pleasure? All of these different aspects of the zine will affect the way it is produced.

Grid System

Everything I create fits within some sort of grid. For some people this may not be the case but I find it's the only way I can put some sort of logical order within my work. It makes it easier to see and you can manipulate the viewer to look at it in a certain way, maybe in a particular way or order.

These are images of Josef Müller Brockmann as I have always admired his work and its close relation to minimalism.

The image above is probably my favourite example of his grid logic. The use of a single column of text doesn't overwhelm the reader with content and the use of the images within a 4 column order with a slight border is genius. It almost creates another image within the 4 images.

I love the incorporation of text with image in this example. As you can see an 'F' which is made up by what looks like an image of the side of a factory or something similar. combining image with type is also a great way to display information. Like creating a clipping mask over some text to be more literal when writing about a specific subject.

The image above shows more use o text than the others. I think it struggles in comparison, this is because the text looks slightly out of place when you look at the spread as a whole, if the point size was to be consistent throughout the specimen it would look fantastic.

This piece shows only text. I think that using this technique would be too formal as it is an informative zine I think that I should just stick to a single block of text and image. That way it will show consistency and not look like a completely different zine from page to page.

Book Binding - Design Principles - OUGD405

During design principles, we learned how books and magazines are blinded. This was useful for me as this is all relatable to the current project and knowledge I can apply to my zine for the coffee industry.

After the session I looked online for a good resource that makes all types of binding clear to the eye and describes it better than I can.
I found an article on Designers Insights which tells you pretty much all you need to know and more about book binding.
Link: http://www.designersinsights.com/designer-resources/choosing-the-right-binding-type


Outer appearance of different types of binding:

Mini-Tutorials of how these stitches are done:

As you can tell, there are so many different ways in which you can bind a book. However most of these to not apply to me at the moment for this current project, at least I will have them for future reference if I think a sewn bound would be more practical than a saddle stitch for a more of a reenforced spine.

Identification & Solution - Studio Brief 04 - OUGD405

Target Audience:

Infozine that can be placed in coffee shop’s for consumers to pick up and read or take away. Developing this concept into a brand/identity to address the issue.

What are they being told?

The reader will be engaged into the way the coffee industry is run, where the money goes and to whose pocket’s it goes into.

How are they being told?

The consumer is being informed/educated through a zine which will explain to them what they are drinking, where it comes from, how much of their money goes to the farmers and what they can do to help the growers earn more of their deserving pounds.

How is my message going to be successful?

Inside the magazine, I will include a collection of vouchers, which can be redeemed at any shop that sells a certain brand of coffee (Packages of coffee will have an infographic style graph telling the consumer where their money is going.).

Finished Zine - Studio Brief 03 - OUGD405

Direct Link: http://issuu.com/eneue/docs/virtuouscoffeeco1/0

What is a Book? - Design Principles - OUGD404

Today during design principles, we learned and expressed our own opinions on what a book is and what function it performs.

We started off by creating this diagram in our groups of 8. By asking each other what a book meant to us and writing them down to gather a good amount of information and opinions on what a book was to that person.

Each group was then asked what was the best answer they had gotten. After this, we debated the different uses of a book and discussed what we all thought best described it.

The spider diagram of the above question.

We then went on to decide how a collection is organised and listed the most probable words, additionally, we briefly spoke about binding techniques used, but this will be covered in more depth during next session.

After all of the exercises we did, we then all chose what our favourite book was and why.

I chose 'Little White Lies' (http://www.littlewhitelies.co.uk), an independent movie review/interview/zine that uses amazing designs on it's covers and is a great example of grid layouts.

Here are a few of their issues (via Issuu.com)

Images (Coffee Culture) - Studio Brief 02 - OUGD405

I gathered 10 images from various sources that related to coffee farming, which is the main aspect of what I'm researching.



Then, I decided to take a few of my own, I tried to keep it interesting, but it was difficult to make the images not turn out looking like generic stock images as I only had limited resources.

Statistics (Coffee Culture) - Studio Brief 02 - OUGD405

ENVIRONMENTAL DATA


–Each year, over 500bn cups of coffee are consumed worldwide.

–In the USA, yearly, the amount of wasted paper cups can fill 6,000 Olympic sized swimming pools.

–This means over 4,000,000,000 lbs. of Co2 is emitted.

–6,500,000 trees are needed to produce the required number of cups.

–1,600,000 lbs. of plastic is needed for the lids, the type of plastic used is not bio-degradable.

–Over 2.5 billion cups a year are disposed of in the UK alone.
–Sadly, out of 50 countries with the highest deforestation rates, 37 of which are coffee producers.

–UK based statistics aren’t any prettier than US data, studies show on average total of 4,491,179 tonnes of Co2 are emitted each year, this means every day we spew out 12,304.6 tonnes just from our coffee consumption.

–The store Starbucks reported that they had a carbon footprint of 1,087,723 metric tonnes. That’s equivalent to the rate of nearly 100,000 homes energy use in a year.

–In the US, 14.4bn cups of coffee are sold in paper cups every year, majority of which are not even recycled.

FINACIAL DATA


–The average coffee drinker will spend around £110 on coffee alone,

–The tax avoidance scandal was exposed during winter 2011, Starbucks being one of the main culprits, with its total 793 UK stores avoiding £1.2bn in taxes.

–90% of coffee production takes place n developing countries.

–Finland actually comes 1st for most consumption per capita.

–Starbucks happens to be the 3rd largest restaurant chain in the US, and is still rapidly expanding elsewhere.

–Coffee leaf rust is actually causing a crisis within the production of Arabica beans primarily in South America, where about 67% of all the words coffee is grown.

–Coffee consumption has rocketed by 700% in the last 10 years, much of which is fueled by supply and demand, trends and simply by the fact you can find a coffee shop on just about every street corner.

–Unfortunately, only 10% of profits made go to growers, 25% to retailers, 10% to exporters and a whopping 55% to shippers and roasters.

–Today, a cup will cost you about £2.20.

Words (Coffee Culture) - Studio Brief 02 - OUGD405

I asked at least 10 different people what words first springs to mind when I said ‘coffee’. The results were somewhat clichéd and predictable but a few results  were interesting:

–Brown

–Café

–Beans

–Cake

–Energise

–Taste

–Necessity

–Latté

–Spoon

–Habit

–Speed

–Morning

–Hangover

–Expensive

–Trend

–Headache

–Withdrawal

–Drug

–Caffeine

–Addiction

Opinions (Coffee Culture) - Studio Brief 02 - OUGD405

I asked 10 coffee drinkers their opinions in regards to 4 questions, the results are as follows:

Facts (Coffee Culture) - Studio Brief 02 - OUGD405

20 Facts about Coffee and the industry.

– Coffee is the 2nd most popular drink in the world, after water, it’s ubiquitous.

– There are only 2 strains of coffee, Arabica and Robusta.

– It is the 2nd most traded commodity in the world, second to oil.

– The coffee bean is actually extracted from a sweet red berry and is green in its raw form.

– 4-5 cups of coffee a day is actually known to reduce the risk of death by 12% in men and 16% of women over the course of 12 years.

– All coffee is produced around what is known as the ‘Coffee Belt’, which closely follows the equator.

– Caffeine is actually ingested through microscopic 0.38mm crystals.

– Black Ivory coffee is the most expensive coffee in the world, which is actually made from elephant dung. Tasty.

– In 1675 King Charles II actually banned coffee in the UK as he thought that’s were people met to conspire against him.

– It actually aids performance in exercise.

– The label on a coffee cup actually affects how the consumer tastes its contents.

– The majority of coffee production takes place in developing countries, yet it is mostly consumed in industrialised nations like our own.

– There is a disease circulating around small independent forms called ‘coffee rust’ that renders the beans on a tree useless, this is impacting local farmers and will in turn increase coffee prices in the long run.

– The rise in popularity of ‘pod’ coffee machines like the nespresso could pose detrimental to the future of the environment.
–Well over twice the number of people on the earth is wasted in paper cups made for coffee, and that’s just in the USA alone.

– Coffee happens to be the second most traded commodity in the word, second to petrol.

– Each Arabica tree only produces 1-1.5 lbs. of beans per year.

– Coffee rust could threaten to destroy coffee farms worldwide.

– Beans are painstakingly sorted by farmers ready for export.

– Unfortunately, 70% of Britain's go for instant coffee, scandalous.

Proposal (Coffee Culture) - Studio Brief 02 - OUGD405

Throughout this brief, I will be Observing, collecting, recording, documenting and categorising common traits within the global coffee industry by gathering data from real drinkers.

It is estimated that coffee is worth over $100bn worldwide, yet only less than 10% of this figure goes into the hands of the 25 million producers.

So how does brand, style and flavour of coffee reflect the image of the average consumer and more importantly what economic, social and environmental impacts does the coffee industry pose for the future?