Chiquita Bananas

Chiquita bananas have recently had a re-brand done for them. The brief was to make bananas more cool.

When I first starting looking at the new designs for Chiquita, I wondered what they first was. When I looked into it further I realized each sticker was a good/bad cartoon character. The bad characters are supposedly meant to represent the idea of not letting your idea go bad, and the good characters are suppose to meant be a good banana.

When I read this it actually didn't make sense to me, too me they were just stickers which would attract young children to eating more fruit. Also they bring a bit of fun and laughter to the older age group who buy fruit.

Overall I'm sure people will like the stickers on the bananas due to the humor in them.

Fairy Liquid Anniversary

As we all know recently Fairy Liquid have celebrated there 50th Anniversary.

With this they decided to bring back out the old design for the Fairy Liquid bottle.

When you see the anniversary bottle, it makes you think to yourself, is the old bottle better than the actual new one?

The original bottle had the simple, distinctive look. The simplicity of the design on the bottle meant that it was very simplistic and very easy to notice. Although some people might prefer the up to date design, what the children will like most, is the fact that they can go back to making rockets out of there empty Fairy Liquid bottle.

In my opinion, I prefer the original bottle design for Fairy Liquid, washing up liquid isn't to do with how good the bottle looks, but with the original design for Fairy Liquid everybody knows what to expect, just the simple white bottle with the baby on and the word 'Fairy.' This is something the customers buying it couldn't miss, also the fact they brought the bottle back out brings back memories for people from back in the day.

Mike Rigby Talk

On the 26th November (2009) Mike Rigby came in and gave us a talk about his experience's too date about being in the industry, also too give us some tips on about how to be successful in the industry.

Mike studied at Preston University for four years, since University he's worked at companies such as Imagination, Chase (Manchester) Moon Design, Pentagram and Landor Sydney.

Why Design?

It's interesting also challenging, it's not like any other job, especially being in a call centre stuck in an office 9 - 5.

Great education. No two jobs you get in the industry are the same, so you can always expect something each time you get a new brief.

All the award ceremonies you get to go too, I mean how many other job's do you get that in - obviously apart from being a sportsman/woman.

All the free nights out, and free christmas parties, who would complain about that?

Strong design community - everybody knows everyone.

People in the industry are very helpful.

Easy to work for yourself.

Easy to work abroad.

Positive Impact

Communication you produce with your work.

You produce better design than what's already out there.

Negative Impact

Competition from other deisgners.

Long hours/unpaid overtime.

Pressure on you.

Poor quality of work out there.

Initial pay isn't good.

Client interference - restricts you on how you want to design something.

Placements

Mike had a couple of placements, one was at Imagination in London and the other was at Chase Manchester. The good thing about going on placements is that they speed you up, working on real live projects, networking and yet again free nights out!

One tip that Mark gave us all was if given the chance WORK ABROAD!

Snow Photography

Whilst away this christmas as we all know we had a fair bit of snow.

So with this I decided to take some pictures of the scenery I seen/visited. Bare in mind these where took on my camera phone because my digital camera broke . . . the joys.

Bad Typography

One thing one seems to annoy me is bad typography!

Yes, I'm not the best at English in the world, but when you state obvious spelling mistakes it just gets on your tits.

For example on this example, a simple miss spelling of 'off' makes the big difference.

Maybe the bad spelling is bad, but another thing what annoys me is when the word is split up, like there's a letter missing off the word.

I mean for example, how hard is it on the 'out of order' sign to change the size of the text so the whole word 'order' fits on the line?

Lynx Postcards

Recently I went to the pictures for Orange Wednesday's, whilst there I came across these Lynx postcards for Lynx Bullet.

The reason these stood out to me because initially they made me laugh with what's being implied - basically some sort of sexual activity.

The only concern would be, is it right to have these in a cinema? There is children who won't understand the image, maybe the location of where these are used would work better.

Anagrams

An idea I had for a poster for the Kitchen of meaning brief was based upon the idea of using anagrams.

When I did this for the title 'The Kitchen of Meaning,' there was over 52,000 results. Most of these didn't make sense but yet on the other hand some of them had a bit of humor in them.

Anagram website - link