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KEEPCALM

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CARRY ONFREELANCING

ELENA MANFREDI

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KEEPCALM

AND

CARRY ONFREELANCING

ELENA MANFREDI

Things comes for a reason

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A few days after the initial briefing for the ten days work placement that took place in June 2010, my flat mate Katya received an e-mail from a Spanish friend requesting help. Giuliana, her friend, was about to start her small business selling homemade and completely organic body products with healing proprieties. She made an attempt to design the packaging by herself, asking Katya for any suggestions about the design. Unfortunately for her, but luckily for me, the result was not quite right. The chance that this case offered to me was great and without thinking twice I wrote to Giuliana a long e-mail in which I was offered my help to design her identity and packaging. To show to her what I was capable of I sent her the link to my website. She was enthusiastic and agreed to start to work with me on this project.

Responsibilities

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The first few informations that I learned were about the identity of my client, her real needs for this job that I was undertaking and the target audience of the product that I was branding. The challenge of the whole project was to create a brand for her business that could reflect the organic and handmade nature of the products (two core values that I had to enhance with my design) which are plants and flowers handpicked and owns healing proprieties. The whole process was done while keeping the target audience in mind, composed by young going to middle age woman, organic careful and conscious of the importance of the body. Furthermore it was essential that the whole packaging was reproducible with an home printing, as my client had limited budget. Other duties that I accomplished was help my client to choose the right containers for her products, and researching the perfect paper for this task, which is the same paper on which I am printing this report, ordered from GF Smith, as last step of the design process.

Process

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As a first step to resolve my task I used the Kepling method, a simple questioning tool, which helps the user to broaden the knowledge and the understanding of the task undertaken.

After asking Giuliana for a few descriptive words that would sum up the product’s core ideas, I brainstormed on them to get a first idea from which I would start my research.

Following this, was a thorough investigation into the product I was going to brand; the plants and flowers used as healing remedies. Botanical books, the web and talking with people helped me gain a rich amount of information. The most significant I learned about the ancient heritage of the therapeutic use of plants since the dawn of the man kind.

Then Refreshing my mind on the branding process, thanks to the reading of “What is Branding”, another main step was researching any existing work in the market. Thanks to this I was able to analyze and compare a huge amount of different product brand’s and packaging. This process was essential to help me to understand which of the features in my branding and in my design I should follow and which ones I had to avoid.

The last, but not the least, was the creation of two different mood boards. The choice of the first one by the client helped me to define a fresh and happy feeling to give to all the products.

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A’kin

Balance me

Green and Spring

Yes contains plants extract no tested on animals veganMaybe different products change packaging designnot

No too many different typefaces’ kind and sizes

Yes: logo in the same place in every packaging: dominant background color: white

No repetition of the same drawing on the side of each product: only thing that changes are the colours a lot of bright colors

Yes: logo always on the top of the packaging: the only thing that changes is the bird bitonal ingredient are written on the background

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The first Mood board is colorful, happy and light. I won’t use too bright and shocking colors, but just the ones that resemble the spring, light and fresh and feminine. No dark colors like blue.

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The second one is more serious and elegant and gives the feeling of organic thanks the brown/beiges/green tonalities. No colors apart from these ones and the images of the plants will be black and white on a monochrome background

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Dear Elena, I really love both ideas, but I think that maybe the first one is more what I want (more color, happier, fresh etc).I’ am happy with this and very excited as well. I love the way you approached this project and the reference to Latin is really interesting and creative. Go for it!Thank you!Giuliana

Name generation&

logo design

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Creating a name that sums up days and nights spent on researching, that is unique, memorable, meaningful and descriptive has been quite tough and challenging. Thanks to the systematic process listed above, I noticed an important factor that made my work realizable and unique. During my research mostly on the market, I noticed that in all the products in commerce there was an absence of reference to Latin, the language in which plants are still classified in botanical. Brushing on my knowledge of Latin mythology, I opted for using a name of one of the nymphs. Nymphs are minor female deities, inhabitants of nature, each of them representing a particular location or landform. Alseides are the nymphs that live in the flowers and love also plants both through which they cure wayfarers. That was perfect for my purpose, then Alseide was my first suggestion in the list that I sent to my client. Delighted by the explanation, Giuliana choose it.

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The second one was the client’s favorite. It gives a feeling of balance, elegance and antiquity still keeping the meaning of handmade products

Looking through old botanical prints that my father owed dated 1700,I gathered letter forms and I created in illustrator my own typeface to write the title. I wanted something unique, without using the preset Adobe fonts or the online ones.

Packaging design

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To differentiate product from product, I decided to take the less convenient but definitely more appropriate solution: each packaging would be unique for color and design. I research on the web botanical prints old enough to have the copyright expired, took a detail of each and modified it with Photoshop and Illustrator. The work was intense but results were pleasant. I designed 27 different products: wrap around tags and hanging tags plus 6 descriptive tags. Giuliana was delighted.

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Ingredientes: Infusion de romero, manteca de cacao,aceite de soja, aceite de coco, extracto de semilla de pomelo, aceite essencial de salvia y cedro, and infusión de romero, oxido de zinc y borax.Ingredientes 100% naturales. Producido artesanalmente.

60 ml

Salvia officinalis et cedrus atlantica

Crema facial para pieles grasas

Rosa, symphytum tuberosum et persea americana

Crema facial para pieles maduras

Ingredientes: agua de azahar,cera de abejas, manteca de kariteaceite de aguacate, aceite de consuelda, aceite de almendrasaceite de girasol, bórax, extracto de semilla de pomelo, aceite esencial de Rose absolute y frankicense, oxido de zinc.Ingredientes 100% naturales producido artesanalmente

60ml

Citrus aurantium fiori et calendula officinalis

Crema facial para pieles mixtas

Ingredientes: aceite de almendras y caléndulas, cera de abejas, aceite de zanahorias, manteca de karite, aceite esencial de neroli, rose geranium, bórax, extracto de semilla de pomelo, oxido de zinc. Ingredientes 100% naturales producto artesanalmente.

60 ml

Hyssopus officinalis et matricaria chamomillaCrema para pieles sensibles

Ingredientes: aceite de almendras , aceite de caléndula, cera virgin de abejas. , agua de azahar, manteca de cacao, bórax, extracto de semilla de pomeloaceite esencial de manzanilla e hisopo, oxido de zinc.Ingredientes 100% naturales.Producido artesanalmente.

60 ml

The sizes of the real products are bigger then the ones I am displaying here.

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Calendula officinalis,matricaria chamomilla, et lavandula angustifolia

hidratante,calmante, eccemas de la piel, heridas y cicatrizante.

Ingredientes: aceites de caléndula, aceite esencial de manzanilla , lavanda, manteca de cacao, cera virgen de abejas, y borax.Ingredientes 100% naturales.Producido artesanalmente.

120ml

Arnica montanaCrema de Arnica para

golpes, contusiones y hemorroides

Ingredientes: aceite de árnicacera virgen de abejas, manteca de cacao, aceite esencial deciprés y borax.Ingredientes 100% naturales.Producido artesanalmente.

60ml

Triticum vulgare et rosaPsoriasis dermatitis atópica, descamaciones de

la piel

Ingredientes: agua de azahar, germen de trigo, aceite de rosa mosqueta, crisálida, cera virgen de abejas y bórax.Ingredientes 100% naturales.Producido artesanalmente.

60ml

Ricinus communis etAmygdalus communis Crema facial antimanchas

Ingredientes: aceite de ricino,aceite de almendras, agua de rosas, cera virgenv de abejas, oxido de zinc y borax.Ingredientes 100% naturales.Producido artesanalmente.

60ml

Paper choice

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One of the interesting part of this task was the actual freedom to choose the paper on which all the material designed would be printed, obviously respecting costs. Having already had an optimum experience,GF Smith was the first dealer that I contacted. Thanks to a great and prompt costumer service, in a few days I received their paper catalog. The choice was not easy as they produce splendid and variegated kinds of paper. In the end I opted for an organic feeling embossed paper classified as “Coltskin”,120 gsm, white(the same one on which I printed most of this booklet).They sent me a few example sheets and when I tried to print at home, the results was fantastic! The costs were moderated if bought in large quanti-ties and when I sent to Giuliana some printed example she was happy to agreed with my choice.

Lesson learnt

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Having already had an experience on branding happened during the second term of my first year of FdA under the supervision of Katy Oswald, I was not moving in complete darkness and I had the chance to not commit the same mistakes that I did last year. A year ago, my designing process was confused and the packaging design and logo came before the actual identity foundation, due to a lack research. This time I dedicated a consistent amount of time to it. Furthermore, my design process was systematic and organized, and apart from the research step, brainstorming and questioning have been activities to which I dedicated a lot of time.

“Language is a barrier”

For the umpteenth time thanks to this experience it has been confirmed that nowadays a correct knowledge of the English language is the communication key between population of different nationalities. With Giuliana I had quite a few communication problem as her English was quite unclear in most of our e-mail and this factor let me to loose a huge amount of time and delayed the finishing of the project. Another factor which was the cause of a waste of time was the process that I had to apply in translating Spanish to Latin to Italian. Giuliana in fact sent me all the ingredients and names of the products in Spanish. I had to look on a Botanical Spanish Encyclopedia for their name in Latin which then I had to translate into Italian to better understand what I was designing.

“Learn from your mistakes”

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“Freelancing is painful. Patience is the only solution”

Not being in the mind of your client is something that creates a lot of problem. Mostly the client your dealing with doesn’t really know what he/she wants or keeps making mistakes on what he/she has been sending to you. My case was mostly the latter one as Giuliana was keeping changing ingredients, products’ descriptions and so on, all of this when I was about to finish. A good amount of patience helped me to conclude this project with success. It was definitely a good exercise for my future experience in freelancing as I am sure I will face situation worse than this one. At the end of the day, if you kill the client, who do you pays the bills?

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Bibliography

Shaughnessy, A (2005), How to be a graphic designer without losing your soul, Laurence King

Healey, M (2008), What is branding? Essential design handbooks, RotoVision

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