Live Client Brief: Unorthodox Zine for Awesome Merch
For the collaborative project of our final year, my team and I were given a brief by the company Awesome Merch; tasked with creating a zine, along with four pieces of promotional merchandise and a 'wild card' (Something extra of our choice).
The purpose of the brief was to promote the brand's sustainable range of merchandise and we were required to focus on what we think is 'awesome' as our starting point. With such a broad and subjective brief, we had the opportunity to have almost complete creative freedom, which ultimately led to many innovative and 'out of the box' ideas. When we brainstormed what's awesome to us, we thought about the 5 senses and how significantly they determine what and how we experience things in life.
We chose this as our concept and then developed our big idea:
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'To encourage the consumer to consider the preservation of the planet more, by using the five senses to create an appreciation for the simple things in life.​'
Outcomes:
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After thorough research and development of our idea, we knew we wanted our zine to be highly interactive, have a homemade look and a playful and unique feel; hence the name 'Unorthodox'. We wanted to keep in line with the theme of our concept and the brand's tone of voice as well as engage the consumer and encourage them to take part. We chose touch as the primary sense for the zine as we decided it had the most interactive and interesting possibilities. Interactive aspects include task pages for the consumer to work on and relevant materials and objects used throughout. The rest of the pages feature collages and imagery that we made as a team whilst completing the tasks ourselves; adding to the cohesiveness of the zine.
With our promotional pieces, our main focus was making them relevant and functional in relation to the zine, so that they have a purpose and help to further the interactive aspect of the zine. This includes a tea towel/blindfold that can be used for the blindfolded tasks, a bookmark with stencils that can be used on the interactive pages, tote bags with our branding that are also part of a drawing competition and lastly greeting cards printed with an interactive task. Everything is also cohesive in terms of branding and our branding itself was carefully considered; also made up of imagery we created while doing the tasks as a team.
For our wild card option, we decided to focus on the 6th sense. We decided to create tarot cards that are complete with our branding and themed on the senses. We wanted to create something that was again interactive, but also something unorthodox.
MY JOB ROLES:
CONSUMER AND MARKET
RESEARCH
IDEA GENERATION
GRAPHIC DESIGN
BRANDING AND MARKETING
ZINE MAKING
PRODUCT MOCK-UPS/MAKING
BRANDING
