By changing the core messaging and positioning of Good Seasons from being a delicious dressing mix for your family to excite their dinner salads, we turned it to it being a delicious all-purpose seasoning mix here for your convenience. We played on the low cost and ease of use of the product to pitch our ideas. Although we understood nostalgia played a big part in the percentage of the target audience who was already hooked, we needed to leverage that to give the brand edge—not your mom’s good seasons! We harped on the fact Good Seasons’ packaging and logo was in dire need of an upgrade and its overall presence needed to broadcast much further than just on the store shelves.
Read moreEMCHI Nail Products Color Brochure
EMCHI Nail Products started as a small brand launched from a full-service nail salon in Williamstown, NJ. After a couple years of establishing themselves as both a salon (operating as The Arts Beauty Salon and Spa) and a designer/manufacturer of high quality dip powders, EMCHI found their color portfolio bursting at the seams with 180+ selections.
In order to promote their color offerings, EMCHI approached me to help with designing a new product brochure for them. I visited the salon (pre-COVID) and was handed two items: EMCHI’s current brochure and a custom cut roll fold from a nail lacquer company they use as a supplier. The directions were simple: take the directions from this brochure, put it in a new one with all 180 color swatches and do something like the custom diecut roll fold.
Right.
So over the course of two weeks, I had some back and forth with Nicole, a nail tech at the salon and also one of the managers at Emchi, who was sending me the color photographs piecemeal. Eventually I received all 180 colors, as it was really everyone waiting for the photographer and his editing of the photographs I would also need.
I found designing the diecut version to be really fun and interesting!
About a month later, the product was complete. At the request of Nicole, I reached out to a few printers to get estimates, however it was here we reached a bit of a wall that needed to be climbed over.
The cost was too much. What I had to explain was that for anything diecut, the first run will be expensive, because they have to make the die, but every run after that will be cheaper, so as long as you keep that shape.
They weren’t going for it, and understandably so—it was a big cost. So, to keep the dollar signs down for a bit, we moved to a rectangular format.
After all was approved…
I was asked to make it into a square format.
Okay, no problem!
This is the final, final, FINAL version. It’s also the version they include in all orders you make online.
However, it’s already outdated, as they are WELL over 200 colors now and are continuously releasing new products and adding on to the spectrum. They’re rapidly growing and maybe in the future we can revisit the diecut option!
Design Quickie: Certified Potato (Sticker)
I’m not sure who, when, where, or why the term “potato” became synonymous with a person who views themself as plain/boring/ugly/whatever, but I’m here for it.
And to show my pride as a potato myself, I designed this sticker that reads: “Certified Potato”.
Don’t worry—all of my future blog posts will not be just sticker designs and silly things. I do have some actual work waiting to come out of the pipeline (final stretch, you know?), mostly logo design with some layout stuff mixed in. It’s coming, I promise.
Design Quickies: This is NOT My City (Album Cover)
My younger cousin is intelligent as hell, funny, witty, and 100% her own person. She has her BS (no jokes, please) in Architectural Preservation from TU (what, what) and is working on her MS in Library and Information Science at DU. She’s awesome.
With that said, she also has some of the most quotable one-liners known to man.
One Christmastime (I guarantee it was last year), my boyfriend, and two cousins took a trip out to Bethlehem, PA to visit the annual Christkindlmarkt over in Christmas City. On the way to and from, Yenny kept firing off these phrases that were responses to things we were talking, about, but totally left of center, yet completely on brand. It got so funny with what she was spewing out, I started a new page of notes on my phone just for those sentences.
I said aloud, “Yen, all of these sound like song titles. This can be an EP.” We all laughed about it, and of course she questioned me as she always does. To be fair, though, some of these titles are not things that have physically spilled out of her mouth, but are definitely things she wouldn’t hesitate to say or that relate to her quite well.
WELL, almost a year later, I finally got around to making it happen. Now, this is entirely an inside joke, and for Christmas, to celebrate the “one year anniversary” of these quotes, my boyfriend suggested we get the album cover printed as an LP and instead of a record inside, create a photo album just for her. I think it’s a smashing idea!
I sent a screenshot of the front and back covers to her older sister, who was in the car (she was driving!) when all of this took place and she got a kick out of it. Even told me she’d have to nudge her sister to pre-order it. ;)
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Elements:
Photo of Yen - taken by me at 2018 Wawa Welcome America Party on the Parkway, Philadelphia, PA
Alley stock photo found on Google
Typefaces used: Rock Salt, Myriad
FBI Anti-Piracy Warning logo (downloaded as SVG from Brands of the World)
Republic Records logo (downloaded from Google)
Parental Advisory logo (downloaded from Google)
Time taken: 2 hours
Programs: Adobe Illustrator, Adobe Photoshop
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Poster: Alpina B7
Project: Serif Vs. Sans Serif Effectiveness in Advertising
Type: School Project
Class: ADV5503 Persuasion and the Marketplace
Photographer: Kevin Nguyen (Photos used with permission.)
Two posters designed for an experiment to determine whether serif or sans serif typefaces are more efficient and effective in eliciting positive emotions in print advertisements. The subject of these posters is one of four; only two were present in the experiment.
Each set of posters were set in both serif and sans serif type (one family each) with varying weights.