Starting Recipe-kit Designs

I have now started on the recipe kit designs for Bourbon Streat. I started by looking in more detail at the research and inspiration/competition that Shana had sent through in the PDF file. Below shows all of the imagery she sent:

Typically, the front is more image based and the front is more text based. The front should use a photograph of the dish, often with additional shapes and illustrations, I will also be adding illustrations into the design which Shana will provide by the end of the week.

The front also uses the basic information (serves, time to cook, description etc), and of course the brand logo. The back typically displays the ingredients, barcode, cooking instructions etc)

The front design she liked the most (Wahaca):

The back design that she liked the most (Itsu):

Front and back design she liked the most (Simply cook):

Furthermore, everything that I create needs to use the Bourbon Streat colour palette. Luckily, the colour palette is really fun and vibrant and has enough contrasting colours in to work from and combine together. This is really useful as I'd find a dull, boring colour palette harder to work with, a lot of my own work also uses vibrant, contrasting colours.

Shana has also provided brief templates for me to follow for the front and back designs, however she mentioned that I am free to play around with whatever I feel looks best. I'll have a play around with different layouts, the more creative freedom the better.

Below shows the initial colour palette that I tried out for backgrounds with the image of the dish. Shana mentioned on the phone that the Crispy Blackened Chicken and Dirty Rice is the main hero flavour and that the design should use more of the turquoise shade that is used for most the branding. For the other 2 flavours, I first tried the colours that I thought represented the actual food the best.

However, the background colours for the other 2 flavours (2: Cajun Jambalaya Rice and 3: Roasted Garlic Mac n Cheese) clashed too much with the photographs

Below shows the final background colours that I have chose for each flavour. Flavour 1 uses a turquOise background with magenta text, Flavour 2 uses the midnight blue with orange text and flavour 3 uses the magenta background with yellow text. It was important to make sure the background colour will contrast well with the text colour.

Below shows variations of typefaces that I was deciding to use. The PDF slide mentions that the main font that Bourbon Streat uses is Blaue Brush, but to use any simple font for the rest of the secondary font. I will use Bleau Brush for the headings and the simple, secondary font for the block text. Blaue Brush is the font used for the logo.

Shana will send over main font as it's not free.

For the secondary font and block text I used a Sans serif typeface as the information that uses the secondary for needs to be easy legible and simple, but not boring. I tried a number of different typefaces but my top 3 were Questrial, Quicksand and Raleway. 

I decided to go with Questrial as it's bolder than the other 2, making it stand out more on the overall full front design. However, I will ask peers which they think works best so this may change.

Questrial

Quicksand

Raleway

The front of each recipe kit needs to include the serves, time to cook and spice level. Below shows 3 different variations that I experimented with to display this in a more interesting way rather than just a block of text. I played around with hierarchy text and illustration. In the end, I felt that the most minimal, text based version worked best (third image)

Below shows the initial 3 layouts that I are similar to the template that Shana sent through, along with what I think worked well. I'm still waiting on the Blaeu Brush font before I move forward with these. Once I've added that font in, I will hold a small group crit to see what people think works best and how I can develop the designs further and apply it to the other 2 flavour recipe-kit boxes.

Next I will work on the design for the back.

Today I worked on this brief for 2 hours and 10 minutes. I will continue to log how long I spend each time so that I get paid for the correct hours. Estimated time that I stated on the contract is 12 hours (£96, £8 per hour) with further changes out of this time at additional costs.