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.

Summer Video Edits - The Kitesurf Centre - Liquid Force

Over the summer I have been doing a few edits for The Kitesurf Centre, this involved filming in a range of conditions and then putting a quick edit together after.

Some are about equipment, others have been used to advertise lessons and even a few mini vids to help show off a trend or new sport such as the Kite biking (BKX) video .

Here are all of the clips and videos I have created on this project over the summer:



















There are quite a few but it has really helped me work on my filming and editing, trying a range of cameras and techniques, I will soon be upgrading from the GoPro Hero 3 to the Hero 4 which has just been released and am eagerly awaiting the arrival of a DJI Phantom 2, which will greatly open up the angles available to film with it's superb versatility. Kitesurfing videos with a drone will be following soon. I have had some issues with editing a lot of the GoPro footage that is taken straight into Adobe Premiere, with much of it often having to be put through GoPro Studio first. For a couple of the mini vids where little editing or posts production is required I have just used GoPro studio as there was little need to move it across after.

2014 Promotional work

With the new year starting The Kitesurf Centre has brought in all of the new gear and so with that comes all the new promotional material and banners to go with it. These were all created using Photoshop CS4
Here are a few examples:

These two were used as part of a scrolling banner on their shop home page.

This was actually used around November although I found it so fun to make and decided it was worth putting in the post.

The other main pieces of work has been a of a similar nature, a desk front, holiday adverts and end of lesson hand out packages.
 

Next post all about photography and how to create circular panoramics!

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.

Banners

As many of you might have noticed a majority of my design work is for kitesurfing companies, and most of this is for The Kitesurf Centre, this has included, logo's, clothing, websites pages, flags, vinyl for vans and now includes banner designs.


The aim of this project was to create a banner 8ft x 3ft that would be visible from the road and catch attention of passing traffic. I started off with a few rough ideas to try and get to terms with how they wanted it to look.

Here it was decided that the top banner goes well with the new van design as the sweeping wave shapes links in.

However we wanted to work out a way to show what the sports were to new customers, We tried two methods, one with photo's the other with silhouettes, this was most effective at the photo's were difficult to see at a glance and so not good for traffic.

I then integrated the designs together, changed the font and came up with a couple of final designs to choose from.

The first was more of a concept, just seeing if using a vector wave in the background could work well, the colours were quickly inverted on the silhouettes to see how they might look. It was decided that this was not clearly visible and that the the other design the details were far clearer.

To finally complete the design, Shop, Lessons, Hire, Club were added which involved moving the logo over, you will also notice that the sports have been moved around throughout so that stand up paddle boarding does not have a priority spot as this is a less important sport for the centre.

I liked this final design as it is clear from a distance while still having extra detail in the design faintly which will be noticable to those standing in the car park which should make it more interesting than standard banners.

Since posting this I have also added a Facebook F as shown below so that passers know that The Kitesurf Centre can also be found on Facebook.

Bubbles Side Banner

I was recently working on a project which involved redesigning a side banner for a site.
There were a few constraints:

• It preferably had to be able to link to other parts of the site
• Show the different activities available
• Look good when made low res and small image size for fast loading.

With this in mind I set about my task, the company is all about the sea so I wanted to work on something water based. A simple gradient would work well and also allow pages that are long to just have a plain colour after a certain length allowing fast loading.
Bubbles are something that I have always wanted to do after all those sonic games in my childhood but have always found difficult to draw so I took up the challenge.

After reading a few blogs I had a go and this was what I created.

For some of these I used brushed from the Hawksmont Universe - If you ever want to create something in photoshop and aren't 100% sure, it quite complicated, or maybe it's a fairly common thing, look for brushes of this first; there are so many free ones out there. 

Leaflet design - The Kitesurf Centre

Still following the same lines as the previous two projects was this latest one. Previous years The Kitesurf Centre ( TKSC) had used a single leaflet side sheet, very handy due to it's size however extremely difficult to show a great amount of detail on and as the company grows it has wider range of activities and therefore items to be placed on the leaflet.
It was a quite simple task all the details were on the site on the summary of courses page
I then had to see what else might want to be added and then put that into the design.
Instead of having a conventional 2 fold leaflet like a book I wanted a concertina effect allowing 2 fronts, one to have The Kitesurf Centre and one for the Stand up paddle board centre (The SUP Centre)

Here is how it works

This although makes it great to use makes it a little hard to design but this is how the preproduction designs looked:

This is as much details as I feel I could add without making it too busy or removing one of the front pages.

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

Playing around with some photos for work