Advantage Module

Designing with a students Agency 2012

 Our student design agency called ‘The Saxons’ all collectively selected and agreed upon working for the client ‘Kate Wilshire’ with her business ‘Amiya’, assisting the making of Natural Handmade cosmetics. With each of us working in different specialist areas and having different talents, we established that our group suited her requirements more so than the other clients.

Us first year’s, as the designers, started coming up with initial logo ideas and designs for Kate Wilshire’s business ‘Amiya’.  ‘Amiya’ means friendship in Italian, so as my starting point I looked into friendship pictures and symbols for inspiration. While doing research I came across a black, elegant symbol of friendship, which immediately caught my eye. I thought it would work well incorporated in a logo, as it looks classy and stylised, the look that Kate wants to achieve.

Our Final Logo Design.

I met up with the other first years in our group, and we laid our ideas and designs out for each other to see. We had very different ideas and impressions on how the design should look, and not all of which were successful, however my design could be developed further. Before proceeding we made a few alterations to improve upon my design, such as re-placing where the symbol was positioned. We decided to use the friendship symbol in replacement of the ‘y’ in ‘Amiya’, as it has a similar shape to a ‘y’ and we thought overall it worked well, making it look professional and neat. We showed the design to the other team members and they agreed it looked well thought out and very visually pleasing. In the meeting, Kate was really enthusiastic about the logo, and told us it was what she wanted, so we decided to work with it.

 Final Business Card

Our next step was to design a business card that would communicate her profession. We all worked together to develop our initial ideas and respond constructively to each other’s thoughts. I had the idea to keep it clean and simple, including only her contact details and the logo. We discussed the composition, with the result of the logo being arranged in the bottom left hand corner, and her contact details directly opposite, balancing it out. We used the same font for the details as the logo, keeping it consistent, and professional. We also experimented with borders and eventually found the perfect background that suited the logo. We kept the black and white theme in order to meet the client’s elegant requirement.

Final Leaflet.

Overall I think we worked quite efficiently as a team, we all got along very well, and had great communication. We formed a friendly working environment, coordinating our individual roles with great interaction. We successfully produced our required work by our set deadline, this was made possible by myself and the other first years meeting up for a couple of hours every week outside of the Advantage lesson, to work on our idea’s and designs towards to brief, and to make sure we were on top of all the work. We also used the allocated time to plan future Advantage lessons, discussing and deciding what we’re going to work on, so we could be as productive as possible. We created a facebook page specifically to contact fellow students in regards to the job, this enabled us to stay in contact even more, and it was helpful as it allowed us to upload our documents and designs, and let us share ideas. I thoroughly enjoyed the whole experience of the Advantage Module, and working as a team, I feel that I have learnt a lot, and have a better understanding of what it would be like to work for a client.