The Analogue Pitch: Schweppes Rocker Bottles

Here is the photo of the analogue pitch submitted for an assessment regarding critical thinking and idea development, more to come later on in the day regharding issues and improvements as well as control group updates.

The analogue pitch

Other idea's that came before the bottle: Fried Noodles

WEell today is the day that our first assessment for Luke's Design and critical thinking unit of this subject and before this blog is graced by the analogue pitch of the "Rocker Bottle" design I came up with, I thought I would take the time to go over a couple of the other ideas that I came up with when it came to thinking of a product. As you already know from previous back logs of posts talking about Schweppes bottles, it was required that that sort of critical thinking was applied to a range of products.

the first product on the chopping block was a simple one:

Mi-goreng noodles

Yes, the obscure noodle snack that seems to either spread by culture or word of mouth, I hadn't even heard of the things until I came to Wagga some years ago and I was shocked that I had gone so long ignorent of this simple yet delicteble food that serves the poor admirably. However looking at the packet I can understand why this food had gone on so long without my notice and maybe you'll see why when you gaze at the following...

To me this doesn't exactly market the taste of Mi-goreng well and conveys more of the food suggested you add to the noodles to enhance the flavour, the most glaring example being that of the egg that takes centre stage on the packet and looking closely at the other vegetables and odd bits added to the dish it's very hard to see any noodles at all, in fact I daresay that without the "Fried noodle" label on it I would easily mistake this for some sort of Asian meal in a packet (Which has all the charm of a sandwich from a petrol station vending machine). It has to be said though that the colour scheme of their logo works well with a good mix of warm colours and the packaging wasn't the orginal reason I choose to take a look at Mi-groreng noodles. It was these:

The sash packets, scourge of kitchen benches everywhere as they spill over in globules lumps and sticking to fingers as they make the second last voyage of there existence to the bowl. There were a number of ways to go about this but the first idea that came into my head was to completely redesign the package from the plastic sash's to the wrapping itself to a cardboard box that came complete with bottles for the individual sauces that would squirt out more controlled offerings of the sauces.

The other issue to address was the lack of noodles being visibly shown on the packet while keeping all of the suggested things visible on the package but such a task did seem slightly odious as to get an idea of how to lay it out i would have actually had to cook up a fair chunk of Mi-Goreng and then pose it for reference. It may not seem like much of a reason to drop the idea but a transition from plastic to cardboard seemed to carry just as many negatives as positives and the idea of evolving a product to make it better seemed hollow in this case.

Dave's photoshop Class: Selection tools

Today in Dave's Photoshop class, the lesson was all about selection which on the surface doesn't sound like much, but in actuality selection is one of the most important things you have to master in programs like photoshop, especially if you want to create anything of actual worth when it comes to manipulating or creating images.

The exercises Dav presented us started with the basic shape of a circle and then progressed to the letter "S", a printer, a car on a highway and a girl sitting down. (That's also in order of difficulty with the circle being the easiest and the girl being the hardest, hair can be a nightmare when it comes to selection). Not only did we have to cut out these objects and paste them on a black background which highlights the irregular shape defects caused by the selection tools but we also had to use the pen tool. A vector based tool that creates curves between points based on anchor points and takes a fair amount of fiddling to get right, even for seasoned pen tool users.

The following image is the black background with the objects unceremoniously pasted onto the surface to show our accuracy with the pen tool.

Selecting with the pen

The next task was to create an image where objects were pasted into the scene and made to look as though they were part of the original photo, for this a highway picture was given and the car was duplicated and enlarged slightly to account for the distance in space and then the edges were blurred to help get rid of the stick out effect that objects get when you place them in another scene. A plane was then finely cut from another photo and placed into the shot with the luminosity lowered to wash out the strong colours it came with originally. The edges were once again blurred so it doesn't appear as a copy/paste job.

I'm seeing double

That wraps it up for today's photoshop class, stay tuned as updates to the Schweppes advertisement progress are posted later in the week.

Drawing Dave's Photoshop class: Badgers and Bombs (Abstract layer work)

For today's photoshop escapes it was our task to take a bunch of images and then arrange them in such a manner as to be unrecognisable next to the original images. Our first job was to use the images supplied by Dave featuring the moon, Einstein, a nuclear detonation, and an x-ray of a hand. Since I'm not really a fan of abstract art this was mostly me winging it in terms of lay out and composition, trying to find a balance between something good to look at while keeping a central focus. For me this was the eye of Einstein which despite the numerous replications I kept the eye on top of itself and the multiple eyes actually did a good job of enlarging the eye.

We are all sons of bitches

After the first image we were sent to retrieve images of our own so naturally I went straight for pictures of honey badgers and city scape's with an aim of creating a Godzilla like image although the honey badgers get lost in the layers of cities and pictures of stone angels.

Badgers in the City

That was all I managed in the three hour time slot although I can see how people can use these abstract art pieces to convey things, I'm just not sure it's for me.

Dave's Photoshop class: Dolly* tool

For this Wednesdays class the main focus was on the cloning tool with a few exercises covering its application across a number of images. For the first few exercises it consists mostly of fixing up images removing the scratches or in the case of the lake photo removing a garish red dash from the centre of the portrait. The others were outright modifications changing door signs while completely removing elements of other images.

This is the photo of the computer case with before and after showing the removal of the scratches which wasn't as straight forward as it seemed with a number of scratches covering different shadowy areas that could easily escape attention unless your paying very close attention to the image.

Before:

After:

The next photo had a lot of work going into the finer details as the red gash ran right across a lot of high detail objects so it required going into the image at a high zoom and touching out all of the red while ensuring that hard lines of the various objects continued naturally without any jarring edges or weird colour variations.

Before:

After:

The next image was of a door where an unfortunate sign was accosted with the worst font in history and is recovering in intensive care after a mace was used to remove the offending text.

Before:

After:

I have it on good authority that the door will make a full recovery although whether this is the last we've seen of the offending text remains to be seen as investigators on the scene only found traces of the bad. More exciting updates as the story progresses.

(*It's like Dolly, get it?....You know... Dolly the sheep, with the cloning and... actually you know what? Forget it! Your no fun anyways. )

Luke's adverstising class: Addressing the issues of Schweppes and sumertime

Here we go, probably one of the hardest thing to do considering the sheer amount of design work that has gone into the brand but after a bit of searching around I've come to the conclusion that I could definitely get away with designing a few things to address the issues I bought up with the design in the previous post about the Schweppes summer time bottles going all the way down to the bottle itself.

On closer inspection of the cons of the bottle design it has occurred to me that the main highlight of the conflicting designs of fifties and late eighties is a flaw that goes all the way down to it's fundamental roots. Schweppes has always sold itself as a traditional drink that will always be the traditional drink and it's angle they tried to pursue with a cheetah in a previous advertising campaign to varying degrees of success.

The vibrancy of the packaging has always been a positive strength of the brand that makes it stand out so the departure from that vibrancy with it's scratchy aesthetic doesn't serve to promote the brand from it's competitors that mostly stick to a single or duo tone colour to promote their brand (eg: the coca cola company).

Doing research through Deviant art has yielded some interesting designs that would instantly be more effective and eye catching while sticking with what the company is known for, such as this entry from the deviant artist exadorv, that catches the vibrancy and hue of the colours and gives a compelling summer themed advertisement.

So what is the angle I'm going for in my own redesign of the Schweppes bottle that I have scrutinized so heavily you may ask?

Simple:

Schweppes - Setting the tradition

By embracing the positive influences of it's design throughout the different time periods, re-create the bottle, with a new design scheme that propels them throughout the ages as being the tradition, as though everything to this point has lead to this design.

the next post will be research and sketching of bottles so stay tuned for more exciting* developments as they occur.

(* Exciting as far as this site is concerned or if you live in a giant grey cube+)

(+Not that there's anything wrong with that).

OH&S Chronicles: Confidence is another form of carelessness

So here we are at the second of the great* OH&S chronicles and this tale of misfortune comes from Queenslands own OH&S awareness website. A handy little resource that gives several accounts of accidents that have occurred in the workplace often highlighting that the cause of these accidents weren't actually things that you would typically be a factor to contributing to an accident.

In this example, a workers over confidence in his abilities lead to the incident, highlighting this important lesson to approach oh&s from any conceivable angle when it comes to assessing risks in the environment. If the proper steps aren't taken, you can never know if the next tractor+ that turns over and ruins a life is yours.

(*Great has many interpretations from great success to great failure, something to bare in mind when someone uses the word "great")
(+ If one replaces tractor with any other object that could hurt or fatally injure you in your relevant field of work)

Luke's advertising class Research: Schweppes summer rewind bottle design

Bit of a lengthy title for this blog post which is detailing all about the effectiveness and non effective elements of a Schweppes bottle featuring the logo of their summer rewind promotion. Now just based off the previous advertising campaigns Schweppes has always tried to adopt a refined mature sense of imagery with their products. This has often resulted in retro designs ranging from the kind of graphics you would expect to see in the late fifties as the following image can attest towards.

This retro style and aesthetic has been carried out to different degrees ranging from the bottles themselves to the graphics printed on the labels.

Schweppes has also taken on the motif of bubbles and has it ingrained into the physical bottle of all of their plastic bottles while glass bottles feature the bubbles motif as part of their graphic, interestingly enough the graphic is reversed on plastic bottles, where the bubbles have been integrated into the bottle but the graphic on the labels feature glass bottles as prominent pieces of art.

An image of the bubbles motif Schweppes uses in the design of their plastic bottle

When it comes to colours Schweppes find themselves in a position where their free to use a wide range of deep colours though their range, and each colour has been matched appropriately to the flavour.

So while this is all well and good how does the current bottle I have in my hands compare with a mainstream market, weighing in it's pros and cons? Well for starters an a few images to give an idea of the product. (I don't have a camera available at the moment)

This is the bottle that I have in my hands -

And this is the logo that they've added along the top of the label of the bottle with a blue colouring scheme that is featured across the entire range of Schweppes products from lemonade to Pepsi, to solo, to mountain dew, etc.

The particular gimmick of this promotion is that when you collect enough points from drinking Schweppes products, you can send away your codes and points and get a shirt, which is a simple enough gimmick although it does lack a bit of the grand prize feel of a lot of other promotional offers however there isn't an element of chance to this promotion aside from their total stock.

Breaking down the design of this bottle and it's corresponding label yields a mixed bag of pros and cons.

Pros:

1. The blue and orange stick out to an extent that the gimmick stands out amongst the other bottles that its next to on the shelf.

2. There is no chance with the gimmick so if you buy the product a certain amount of times you will get the item you desire, if you do indeed desire the item in question.

3. The bottle itself is well designed, recyclable and suitable for mass production and consumption in a way that is favourable to a super markets way of stacking product.

4. The print across the bottle harkens back to the older days of glass bottles and helps to re-iterate the retro feel that Schweppes endorses.

Cons

1. The retro look of the glass printing gets cut off abruptly at the bottom of the bottle.

2. The gimmick doesn't have the same sense of reward as other competitions with a big pay out.

3. It harkens back to two different time periods with the gimmick of the faded shirts being a fashion from the eighties while the bottle aesthetic has roots in the fifties.

4. The scratching aesthetic that they've added to the logo gives it a degraded look that once again seems at odds with the graphics normally associated with the brand.

 Whether or not there are more pros and cons for this design could be debated, as this particular design has gone through several iterations to where it is now, but this current design does have its issues. But can anything ever really have a perfect design? Perhaps we'll find out later, perhaps not, either way it'll be interesting to see what comes of this in future iterations of the ideas Schweppes has carried throughout the years.

~ Fin