OUGD504 Studio Brief 02 - Evaluation

In this second brief of the design production module we were tasked with choosing a kickstarter pitch for a potential project of which we are interested in but not only that a project in which we thought the existing branding wasn’t appropriate or relevant enough for the company. This meant that the designing that we created would be most applicable to the product as we have interest in the product itself. I chose Tratar Bicycles a company from Slovenia that creates customised hand carved wooden bicycle frames.

This was a module that I really enjoyed partaking in as being able to chose the company that we designed the branding for was up to our choice meaning that when I chose Tratar Bicycles It helped my design as I was interested in to the company and product and what they are about and this was yet again another chance to further develop my branding skills and this is great for me because branding is an area of graphic design that I have become vastly interested in and something I see as a major part of my practice in the future as a fully fledged graphic designer and so this is something I relish the chance to improve.

I found this brief very interesting and very inspiring when researching for the designing stage of the unit as with an interest in to the product already I was excited to read more in the company itself. In the research stage I discover all of the little aspects that made Tratar bikes the perfect company to base the project on as they had the USP’s needed to develop the growth of a company. These USP’s include the eco-friendliness of the company’s minimal carbon footprint, their pride in where they come from displayed in the providing of a lot of jobs to Slovenia a country that suffers from widespread unemployment and finally their concentration on equilibrium of style and comfort essential in their products. This raised importance in research-focused design has massively developed my researching skills.

As it was crucially important to experiment with as many possible design decisions I employed a major concentration of the unit in the idea generation stage and developing stage in order to ensure that all possible considerations have been evaluated and this entail generating around 25 possible logo decisions. This helped me as a lot of times in my designing stages I can be seen to not consider enough possible avenues to go down with the logo and often get stuck with one idea without experimenting enough.

This unit as a whole made a drastic improvement to my branding skills as it really taught me about the importance of designing a logo that is fully representative of the companies ethos’ and ideas and finally it gave me a chance to gain experience with the real world graphic design industry as it was important to pitch our redesign of the company to the owner and in doing so I obtained some great feedback.