2015 a New Year, New designs

A new year and time for a slight refresh for The Kitesurf Centre.

We decided that many of the customers liked their previous circular stickers so we have continued with these designs with a slight change in terms of the colourways. The majority of their clients prefered the Blue with others opting for the purple and a few the pink, the yellow was the least favoured firstly the colours had not come out quite as planned ,the print quality had been quite low and the company has since closed, but also the yellow did not match up with many of the boards or footstraps colour schemes which is where most of the stickers are placed.
Looking into this I have designed this years stickers by first looking at some of the main Kitesurfing brands that are stocked by the centre, such as North, Liquid Force and Airush and seen which are their colours for this season. Using this info and after speaking with customers over their prefered colour of stickers and boards I then proceeded to produce the new circular stickers.
I do the main basis for the design in illustrator as I find using vectors for the kites and swirl much easier especially at the stage where colours are constantly changing and then do any finishing touches in photoshop.

There were a few slight changed to the text to make it a little easier to read at a glance however nothing noticeable without looking at them back to back.

Green is one of the new colours, this is used on many of the 2015 kiteboards and I went for quite a neutral green so that it works with more of the other colours on a board rather than the clashing style I used on the last batch.

The other design idea I wanted to visit was one where the brand name was more prominent, or even the basis for the design itself. An advantage to this is that it could be used more for marketing on items such as car bumper stickers, on seeing the deisgn The Kitesurf Centre chose to do a large and a small of this so it could still be used on board or other items.

Van Vinyl Design

I have worked on other designs for vans, however it is always difficult to show how it would look with the designs on 2D drawings of a van, this time only the design will be done by me and not the vinyl cutting or fitting which is the tricky part for a rookie.

First looking online to get some ideas of what the customer needed and the best colours to be easily readable. Here were their top choices:

A key point here is that the vans are either black intially or have a full wrap on them which will be expensive so the aim will be to design something similar but keeping the white.

Here was my initial design that I send off to gain quotes. We expected that the large blend on the blue wave would end up increasing the price quite dramatically but we liked the design and so wanted to keep it. The budget for the van was around £500 including VAT so we would have to keep the design within this limit.

I received a range of quotes from companies from £425+VAT all the way up to £945+VAT

I checked that they would all be using the same material and methods and proceeded accordingly.

Below shows a slight redesign by the vinyl company making it possible to be fitted.

There are a few slight differences, some so that the van can have the vinyl applied a little easier, others are because they simplified the design/missed some of the detail.

One of the differences I notices the most was the blend on the wave and how it was not quite as smooth. I will add the completed picture of the van once it has been fitted.

Oystercatchers Holiday Cottage Camber

So for this latest project I was asked to design an entire range of marketing material for the customers, this included Website, leaflets, Logo and even some stickers for marmalade and Jam pots.

Initial Planning

Logo and colour choice, while this began the customers chose a name for the cottage - Oystercatchers. This we deemed showed that it was good for birdwatchers but without alienating families who were looking for something near the sea but might not know the connection with something less obvious.

From there I had a few ideas but the main one revolved around making a bird in flight look as basic as possible so that it could be used in a vector style design.

Here you can see the type of bird I was using and the variations in flight angle that I could use.

This I decided showed the most shape to the bird and colours however I did like the look of it with both wings up.

Here is my initial ideas

The clients liked this idea of the other designs so I went ahead using this.

Leaflet

The first issue here was getting a decision on how many sides and the size of the leaflet. To make this easier we collected a large number of competitors flyers/leaflets and any that we liked the look of and laid them all out. This was a very simple way to find the clients needs and preferences, size, colour, fonts layouts were all roughly agreed upon, I went back and made a few ideas of fronts and backs, here are the two final ideas:
    Front                                                                           Back

  

These were about the 5th or 6th edit, there weren't really any big changes the key this was the readability, I enlarged some text, removed others and simplified the map. We all liked these and after some editing to the photo's to lighten some up and make the roof look a little tidier it was off to the printers.

Note: Always make sure you image is saved as CMYK for this otherwise it will usually come back looking not quite as bright as it the RGB that you would have been looking at one your screen. Easiest option is to always work in CMYK and when working online use websafe colours so there is no change on different browsers.

Website

With the rough idea on leaflets sorted through seeing others I used the same method to help diagnose their true wishes for the site.
The key parts that we were aiming for was a "light" site in more than one way, firstly keeping it bright with a white background and also something that is simple and not too overwhelming.
For such a simple design I decided a basic wordpress site would be most efficient so with an appropriate theme installed (lenora) I began.
The header

This I found showed not only the name but also what the site was about and roughly where while also covering up some of the wordpress theme's standard header.

I then took a few photo's of the site for use in the galler (gallery) and on each page before creating the front page (Holiday Cottage Home page).

From here the further pages were designed each with an important section just below the menu, such as an image, map on where it is or a booking calender. To complete the booking and gallery NEOgallery and Bookings plugings were both used. The site was created entirely using free plugings and themes keeping costs down while still keeping it simple enough so that the owners can organise bookings without need for technical support.

Check out the site here: Camber Holiday Cottage

All of my designed sites are hosted at JustHost and usually purchased through GoDaddy.

For further detail, a breakdown on any of my work or interested in having me design for you please don't hesitate to contact me or visit my site - www.rupertcawtedesigns.com

T-shirt Designs - Claim boarding

One of the biggest issues I found when coming up with ideas for t-shirts was once having the design, how to show it on a t shirt or hoody and not look like the design is hovering above or a separate article. The image below shows how you would send it for manufacture with the design separate just to show where it is to be placed, however this does not look great for marketing.

I then found an image of an actual tee in both male and female styles and placed the image on this, with slight distortion and fading it looks far more realistic.

This method was then also transferred onto hoodies, for this the drawstrings had to be placed over the top of the design  although being flatter it enabled less image manipulation to take place.

Colour variation is fairly simple, making a quick hue/saturation change via an adjustment layer.

This simple colour alteration means that seeing your design in other ways helps to produce other ideas such as offsetting one colour or a spray style, both shown below.

See more at Claimboarding and check out the latest tees and hoods.

3d logo design - illustrator - Claim boarding

The design for the Claim Boarding logo is fairly simple, the punched hand in the air would be the rider "claiming" a trick once they have landed it. They specialise in Boarding clothing and so that is the clothes on the silhouette.
What I have done here is taken the standard logo and transformed it into a 3d design, for this I used illustrator and it's 3d extrude and bevel function.

You have to be careful not to rotate the design too much when there is a lot of the detail close together as it becomes less defined the further you go.

Once created it is possible to then colour the edges, this will help the cut out section stand out. Here I have used a light grey which gives a chrome effect.

Adding a background such as the blue I have used works well as it allows the show to form on the colour and give the appearance of a wall.

Sticker Design - The kitesurf centre

With the new 2011 - 12 logo designed and other car stickers almost all given out new material was needed.
Instead of having expensive purpose built car stickers made we aimed to just have some large stickers made that could be used either on cars, boards indoor and outside against the severe elements that kite equipment is exposed to.
After much research exterior grade vinyl was the best choice however this came up with some extremely high prices, averaging about £0.50 per sticker on orders of 500. Plus to see a sample there would be extra involved fortunately Moo came to the rescue, they product sticker packs of 100 stickers for around £20, these are much smaller only 38m in diameter. No the fastest in terms of delivery day from order almost 2 weeks.
A large variation of colours is available rather than paying per design as with most companies so we sent 6 to test.

Here are 4 the others were just slight variations in these with the colours, one of the key colours we wanted to test out was the pink and white and this had become a main part of the colour scheme use on the website.

Purple had been used on the previous t shirts and worked well with the old design so a good outcome was expected from that and the yellow blue.

One thing we did notice was that the text built into the ring was difficult to view unless close up so wasn't very good and didn't fit well with the simple to understand logo and so was scrapped, this was good as it had showed that having prototypes / samples really paid off.

Satisfied with the colours but wanting something a little brighter we went for 4 variations but only one used here the blue yellow with white text.

The main difference we went for in the final prints was less dual colour stickers and more tripple colour prints  we also brought in the vivid yellow and pink prints to stand out if people a more defined mark or to match the colours of the boards.

Logo Design - The Kitesurf Centre

In 2008 the Brand "The Kitesurf Centre" was born. The logo at the time was a collaboration of many while putting their own twist on it. The design has used the idea of sights or circle around the side from Liquid force at the time, a kite similar to that used by Rodwe and a well shaped waves used in many surf and kitesurf brands. The finished item was a sketch drawn in an airport but still one of the most effective logo's I have seen whether planned or not, split down there are three parts. The Kite, the wave(surf) and a circle or sights which then place the other items and target in the centre.

Here shows a 3d representation of the logo which I have put together and has been used throughout the website and marketing material for a couple of years.

Each year we have kept the centre looking fresh with a new cite and even upgrading the building and continue to do so therefore we decided that this was also a good plan to do for the logo
I was given the task of looking into a new logo and the creation so new stickers and other such marketting material to go with it.

Following the basic idea of the three parts I did not want to change it too much, it had been a variety of colours throughout the couple of years so colour choice was very open but it had to work in more than just the one or two.
I initially looked at changing the entire design such as the wave and kite or even adding a kitesurfer to it however none of these created the correct effect.
Instead I decided to change the exterior circle or at least the sights. With the whole concept revolving around  wind and the weather that is what stuck in my head, in this design I try to put across the idea of sun and the rays produced while also giving the effect of wind with the rotation of these giving a slight eye of a tornado feel to it.

This design worked well and we were pleased with the outcome as it also allowed the use of the name in the logo if needed or absent when not.

The design was then used for much of the marketing material and even placed onto clothing. One of the key changes we had made in the centre was hiring a large number of instructors so to show us as a team we had staff hoodies and t-shirts made to be worn. Here is some of the intial designs for the hoodies however we eventually went for this initial design on the front and the surfer riding along on the back with brands running down the arm in a cub badge style.

Here you can also see how the design also works well with other colour and without the brand name written on.

Next on the list..Stickers