Author Archives: Nancy Zhu

About Nancy Zhu

5081190220065049

UNIQLO Gift Bag

Posted on by

Nancy Zhu

Uniqlo’s brand and its one-time “10 Million Ways to Help” charity campaign are both designed minimalistic with bold solid colors. This gift bag would ideally be placed at the cashier registers of Uniqlo to convey the message to the customers to donate/recycle their used Uniqlo clothes and donate it towards refugees and people in need around the world. The target audience would be Uniqlo’s customers, which are young men and women from the ages between 18 to 35 yrs old.

The gift bag had to be simplistic to match the brand image. To begin, redesigning the Uniqlo logo was interestingly simple for me. I’ve always wanted to do something about circles and fitting typography in them. Since Uniqlo’s logo is stacking UNI above QLO in a square format, I played around with masking the stacked UNI and QLO in a circle, and I loved the way it came out. On one side of the bag, I left the rebranded UNIQLO logo on the signature upper corner of the gift bag against a plain white background. I made the logo green to match the recycling theme.

On the flip square panel of the gift bag, I have the text, 10 Million Ways to Help (their campaign name) and underneath, a subhead, “people in need around the world” to further explain what this campaign is, and narrow it down. The title is very vague, so it continues underneath, “You Recycle, and We’ll Deliver.” It’s a bit more clear, but it should still engage the reader to wonder more about it, in which they can see the tag with a more detailed description of what Uniqlo is doing. This way, the less words on the square panel, the more eye-catching and simple the design. I added a green circle vignette to keep consistent with the logo on the front panel.

For the tag, I have a t-shirt with a short description on what I meant by “You Recycle, and We’ll Deliver.” From my preliminary sketches, I wanted to somehow fit the design of a t-shirt in it, and I decided to use that on the tag. It fit very well with the enlarged logo against the shirt.

The side panels of the gift bag are matching – they’re a picture of a stack of clothes, resembling the donated clothes. It’s like as if the customer can peak inside the bag, and that is what he’ll/she’ll see. This would be a 4-color print, on card stock paper. The string is green, to match with the logo and recycle theme, thus connecting everything together.

Overall, I loved this project. I’ve always had an interest in 3D design and package design. I did wish we could do some packaging design work in this class. I’m also an advertising marketing major, so this type of real-world design work is interesting to me.

Invitation

Posted on by

Nancy Zhu

Design Approach
At first, I wanted a complicated folding system that would make the overall design more interesting. But I realized, if the fold had to be in the same direction, and the folds to be complex, it would be a really large piece of paper when unfolded and the information on the invitation could become very messy and unorganized. Therefore, I decided on a more simple look with only 2 folds, with one fold being a black bar that helps close the invitation. With that in mind, I didn’t want to clutter the invitation with images, especially with too many photos that will be displayed at the exhibition. I kept it simple with a blown up image on the front cover and likewise on the back cover. The title, “Chasing Sanitation” is placed in diagonal, and on the inside, I reflected that pattern in the two images. I wanted to give the images meaning (probably like the way the photographer was thinking”, so I quoted the text to explain the two people in each photograph to attract the audience to find out more about the stories behind sanitation men. I would have liked to have a bit more time to think about my design. I’m not sure how to change it next, but it doesn’t feel like it’s at it’s last step.

Things I Learned
I got to practice using Duotone and sticking to one type of coloring process. That was the biggest challenge for me; I realized that I had used Process Black ink for everything, instead of using a Pantone black, and I had to go back to the document and edit every single time I used black. That was a tough problem, and it reminds me of finding an error in a page of coding – which is like finding a needle in a haystack. I tried googling for the quickest method to find all the instances where I’ve used CMYK Black, and it didn’t help. I ended up manually pulling everything apart and putting it back together.

Typefaces
For most of the project, I used Avenir. For text, I used Baskerville.

Paper
Through the books, I liked Mohawl, soft white, 110 lb cover. However, at Staples, they didn’t give me many options for heavyweights.

Postcard Analysis

Posted on by

Nancy Zhu

For my project, I played with shapes – I balanced circles, rectangles, and squares on the page, negative space – I made gaps in the image so that the audience could assume what should be there, and contrast – I played with the tint and opacity of each color. I preferred sans-serif fonts when I want them to be bold and stand out on the postcard.

I learned a lot about the basics of print production, particularly, the differences between 1-color, 2-color and 4-color prints and what halftones and duotones are. I find it most interesting that printed images are really made of many many small dots on a page and it made a lot of sense to me when explained that the different colored halftones are overlapping each other to make the different shades and colors we see on paper. It was also clarified that grayscale being equivalent to black and white is just a misconception. In reality, grayscale means monochrome.