Responsive Collaborative- Taylors Coffee- Evaluation

OUGD503- Collaborative Practice- Taylors Coffee Evaluation

We chose this brief as a group as we all have a key interest in product design and packaging and it is something that we all want to develop more. I chose to work with illustration, as this is an area I am partially interested in. I have also chose to work with people I didn’t previously know as this is how it is going to be in industry.

The first thing we did as a group is write up a contract confirming what our strengths are and what we can bring to the team. What I felt I could bring to the team was my knowledge of type and layout, one of my biggest strengths is also organization. After speaking to Janin and Rona they told me how they would like more structure and organization in their work, I thought I can defiantly help them out with this. I was chosen to be project manager meaning I am in charge of organizing when things need to be done by, and organizing who is doing what.

The next step was to research; we researched into many areas including Taylor’s coffee as a brand, coffee its self and where it comes from and how coffee is processed, this was useful in giving us some background knowledge. One mistake we did make when we started this project is that we didn’t realize that we had to make a ground coffee product and we were thinking of ideas for instant coffee instead, after a couple of re-reads of the brief as a team we eventually started to generate some ideas.

To gather some primary research we set up a survey on survey monkey and asked our target audience many questions about coffee, how much they pay, what brand they normally go for, do they know how to use a cafetre etc. We got some useful feedback back and this helped us a lot with our concept for the new Taylors product.

Our concept based on our primary research is to have a new decorative illustrative jar that young consumers would want displayed in their student house. Along side the glass jar we would also design three packets for morning, daytime and evening depending on when you drink coffee most focusing on occasion. The morning coffee would give you that morning boost to wake you up, the daytime one is to keep you going through out the day and the night time one is a decafe to chill you out after a long day.

To get some ideas going in terms of design of the product we all went away and chose either morning, daytime or evening and made some collages of things that remind us of that particular time of day. This helped a lot before putting the final design together because we all got a say in what we would like in the design, and why we think it would be suitable.

My main parts for this brief was the type and layout, so I started to look into the type and layout on Taylor’s products. I researched into previous layouts and type within Taylors coffee and found that the type and layout they have now is defiantly their strongest. One element we also wanted to bring to the product is interactivity with the use of QR codes. This would be a good way of the younger customer scanning the QR code and for it to load a video of how to make the perfect coffee.

One main concern I did have with this brief was how I was going to mock up the design on foil packets and to still make it look good and realistic. Before the final design got sent over I practiced with an image off the Internet to make sure I could get the technique right. The final design then got sent over set up on a 7x40 cm canvas document, which is the perfect size for the sticker on the jar, however when I mocked it up I need the design to be bigger as every time I resized it for the packet it went blurry. The moc ups being blurry was defiantly the biggest issue we had with this brief, but unfortunately there wasn’t much we could do.

Finally we printed the label and booked out a photography studio to photograph the final product. The most difficult thing about photographing the glass jar was getting the lighting right on the glass. Overall this has been a really enjoyable project to work on and I am really happy with the final outcome, as a team we have all worked well together and combined our ideas to come up with this new Taylors Coffee product.