OUGD502 - Why do you want a Professional Placement? Contacting Studios, designers and heroes near and far.

OUGD502 - Studio Brief 1 - The Growing Bones Collection - Website Design and Creation.

Having a small amount of web design and creation experience I didn't want to create an entirely new website from scratch myself as I wouldn't have time to even consider it with university work alongside it.

For this reason I decided to purchase a professional looking theme and then customise it to quite a big extent, this would allow me the original build of a website and freedom to change it to how I want, saving a lot of time from building it entirely from scratch.

I found this theme called Tiska, the reason I decided on this one was mostly the style of the menu than anything else, I liked how responsive it was and that was the main thing I was paying for. I have tried creating drop down menus before and none have turned out nearly as nice as this one.

After buying that, I began changing things around in the coding I was sent to suit my needs and wants.

After a few weeks of headaches and screams, I came out with a fully customised and responsive website with everything that I needed on there.

Homepage:

Social networking buttons in top right of container, responsive shopping cart description in top right, 'Shop Indie' campaign banner on left, logo, menu, slider, featured products of website, footer.

Homepage with drop down menu:

About page:

Social networking buttons in top right of container, responsive shopping cart description in top right, 'Shop Indie' campaign banner on left, logo, menu, photo, body copy, footer.

Artist page (unfinished until portrait photos are taken):

Social networking buttons in top right of container, responsive shopping cart description in top right, 'Shop Indie' campaign banner on left, logo, menu, grid layout of creatives featured on website, footer.

Artist page (unfinished until portrait photos are taken):

Social networking buttons in top right of container, responsive shopping cart description in top right, 'Shop Indie' campaign banner on left, logo, menu, name, portrait photo, information on creative, social links, featured work on site, footer.

Blog page:

Social networking buttons in top right of container, responsive shopping cart description in top right, 'Shop Indie' campaign banner on left, logo, menu, blog posts sourced from company tumblr with #thegrowingbonescollection tag.

Products page:

Social networking buttons in top right of container, responsive shopping cart description in top right, 'Shop Indie' campaign banner on left, logo, menu, products grid, footer.

Product page:

Social networking buttons in top right of container, responsive shopping cart description in top right, 'Shop Indie' campaign banner on left, logo, menu, name of product, photos of product, price, social interactions, information, link to artist, add to cart button, footer.

Contact page:

Social networking buttons in top right of container, responsive shopping cart description in top right, 'Shop Indie' campaign banner on left, logo, menu, body copy, contact form, spam check filter, footer.

With the website almost finished I began posting on the social networking pages to inform my previous audience of the change, and how my new project would be taking the rights of the pages and that I hope they are excited on what I move on to do. I received a lot of positive feedback that I'd moved onto a new project and not just left them which is good, rebranding took place after that.

Facebook:

Twitter:

Instagram:

Tumblr:

With a broad range of social media, the company will be able to update and connect with customers and a well built up audience clearly, almost constantly and prove a closer connection with everyone involved for publicity, connections and documentation.

OUGD502 - Studio Brief 1 - The Growing Bones Collection - Branding and Identity.

Having experience in completely branding a company before I knew the amount of time I needed to spend on it to make sure it was right.

I began by pulling together the company ethics which consisted of:

Creativity.

Hand crafted.

Student based.

Professional.

Independent.

New.

Unique.

Premium Quality.

These strung together lead me to some sketches of what I was imagining it to be like.

Remembering again what I was putting into consideration, I was throwing it out the window and making it look very corporate and completely missing the creativity aspect of the project, which at the end of the day, is the most important part.

With some more sketching, I found myself onto something. Two bones crossing over each other, becoming a pen and pencil. The name having four words in it made it easy to factor this into each gap of the cross. When playing on illustrator, it all came together. 

Everyone I spoke to afterwards said the design reflected the ethics and considerations perfectly, I too was very happy with the outcome and found myself with an identity and a main typeface too.

OUGD502 - Studio Brief 1 - The Growing Bones Collection - The Plans.

During the summer, I decided to end my clothing company which I had been running since my second year of college. I decided to end it for a variety of reasons and it was difficult to come to a full decision, but trends were moving faster than I could keep up with and people no longer cared for the designs I was producing even though a year previously, I was getting orders from all over the world and making an average of £60 a day in profit.

This really impacted my motivation to carry it on, it became more expensive to run at the quality I was producing at and over time the company slowly faded out and suffered a loss.

After I decided to call it a day, I became very frustrated because I was so used to having a lot of work to do outside of university as well as the work I did. I almost felt like I had too much free time and so I decided I was going to plan a new business venture, but this time, create something that no one else has done yet, and also, something that will be beneficial, fun, creative and hard work.

Whilst in the studio, I overheard a couple of people discussing how they had made some prints recreationally and wanted to sell them, but had no idea how to go about it. It got me thinking that it would be so much easier to sell work if there was a place dedicated to us as students to do so, without there being masses of people involved and work being lost within it. And that got me thinking further, why didn't I make that possible.

I already had a huge online audience on social networking sites for my previous business, over 6000 people on Facebook, over 4000 on Tumblr, almost 1000 on Instagram and Twitter, it just made sense to make use of that audience to my own and others' benefit rather than let them fade into the distance.

This is when the planning started.

From branching on ideas I came to decisions on what I wanted it to be about, why I was doing what I was doing, how it was going to work, how it would earn enough to keep going, etc.

The name ‘The Growing Bones Collection’ arose from a variety of things. The idea of self-development was a key element tied in with the ideology of metaphoric bones growing like our skills, portfolios and confidence. It is finished with the word collection to represent the unity between everyone involved as well as being more on a personal level with our customers.

This will be a student-only based business so the buyers remain certain that they are supporting emerging creatives and helping them afford to continue their development.

The money would be made by charging a small £3.00 a month membership fee to have work for sale on the website as well as a personal profile to inform audiences about who they are and how they can keep up to date with the creative's work and get in touch with them. This would be complemented with a 20% commission of each sale to keep funds up for packaging costs, promotion, development and of course the time I spend managing it.

After publicising the idea to students on my course, a lot told me it was a great idea and it would certainly motivate them to create more self directed work as well as get their name out.

This was definitely going ahead, now it was plan development and design time.