The organization I chose to design for was 826National. ‘826’ has locations all over the country, all dedicated to helping children ages 6-18 to learn to write. One of the main things they strive for at ‘826’, is to inspire and help the children be creative in their writing. They do this by building creative environments, such as designing one of their locations as a superhero store. I wanted to achieve something similar with my design for my gift bag. In order to fully understand where I would begin with this approach, I needed to know who I would be selling this bag to. I decided to create this bag for teachers and parents, especially the parents of children who have difficulty with their writing.

My design began with a pencil. I wanted the bag to have a certain look and the correct message to match. My first idea was by wrapping the bag with a notebook paper template that I found online and then have a small image of a pencil. I realized however, that the message that I wanted to convey was not coming through. So I created the bag in a CMYK color model, using a die cut to present a pencil shape on the front and back of the bag with both side panels as the lined paper. I went through many variations of this design with different types of font, but was not able to find one that matched my theme. I decided to design my own type face and wrote a continuous message on both sides of the bag. I also used the same idea for the tag and the objects inside.

I learned a lot from this project. It helped me to experiment with many different ideas as well as learning that the final design can come from the hundreds before it. I also learned about new techniques on Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Illustrator, such as how to alter image sizes and their dpi and how to create image tracings of an image.