YCN Yorkshire tea brief

Out of all of the briefs offered for the YCN student awards i was most drawn to the Yorkshire tea brief, which i felt had the most room for design changes as the original packaging illustration is a landscape painting, so i can hopefully take elements from that and add my own influences in. 

I began thinking mainly traditional, using the countryside as the base theme, i thought this might appeal to the current market for Yorkshire tea, adults aged 35+, i also wanted to at least try and make a design using lino, thinking this would add to the traditional feel. 

The thumbnail sketch i decided to go with as a design i would carry over to lino cut. I thought having a small animal in the image would make it more endearing to the audience, although i feel now that i made the design of the owl a little to flat and could use some character. 

Here is the result of 4 layers of lino cut arranged and coloured in Photoshop, i had some trouble trying to make the colours work and tune the opacity of the layers so they wouldn't drown each other out. I also played with the positioning of the Yorkshire tea logo quite a lot, i found it difficult to make the image and the text work together. After i group tutorial i was even more sure that this design is not going anywhere, i enjoyed working with lino and playing with the layers but i don't feel the image out come works in this case. I have re-evaluated my direction with this project and i feel i need to explore other options.  

I still want to make something that is traditional in keeping with my original idea but also i feel like i want to incorporate an element of charm and youthfulness, one of the things said in the Yorkshire tea YCN brief is that they wanted to appeal to a younger audience, so perhaps this is a good opportunity to bring more of my personal work to this project, i am a lot more comfortable drawing characters and things with a little narrative than i am with traditional landscapes. 

So i have designed a few animal characters to continue the project, i feel like this is a smart move after talking with my tutor we both agreed having mascots can greatly boast a products appeals and people will more likely warm to cute endearing characters.

Some digital sketches of my main two character designs, a fox and bunny, who bond together over a cup of tea rather than fighting each other, another suggestion i had was to create a different animal character for each flavor of tea Yorkshire tea have in their range, but i think just designing for the original flavor will be my goal now and perhaps i will think about others if i have time. 

 

These design where made digitally, but i really do want to go back into traditional again, perhaps with inks or watercolour.