The theme for my gift bag is focusing on the upcoming extinction of our beloved elephant pals. This idea stemmed from my love for nature and elephants and realizing that there is a lack of awareness concerning the elephant species endangerment. It is vital for people to know that any species becoming endangered is not a good sign and requires further attention to.

The demographic for my bag would be young adults from their 20s-mid 30s. Therefore I didn’t want the bag to be loud or colorful. My design approach was to keep a simple and clean gift bag. I have an elephant that is more intricately designed with this trunk up, representing happiness, and the second elephant is more simplified with his drunk down, representing tiredness and sadness. The concept for this is that as time goes on, the animals that become endangered slowly become more unfamiliar in our memories. Since the wonderful creatures no longer walk the Earth with us, they are no longer in our sight and slowly drifting out of mind. As the elephant becomes more abstract and less detailed, it represents the concept of elephants becoming extinct.

By using only two elephants and two simple sayings in a sans-serif font, gives off a friendly and simple vibe. The negative space allows a nice contrast between the elephants, text, and the overall size of the bag. I also decided to use a nice small sized font and natural thin hemp material for the handle to retain the heavy and light contrast as well as adding a more natural feel. There is also a sense of fun in the sea-green ripped up tissue paper that fills the bag. My card was a simple cut-out of an elephant using the same purple pantone color to be consistent with my overall duotone model. And lastly, on the bottom there are some elephant feet as well as a bar scan code that ideally would allow the buyer, lets say a shopper at Urban Outfitters, can pick up the bag and scan the code which will lead them to a website link that has a story of the elephant he/she helped and background information about how else to help out.

I learned that sometimes simple and clean is better than colorful and crowded. My first original designs had more data but were more distracting and as I took away certain aspects I realized that the negative space worked to my advantage and there was no need to go overboard with excessive details and photos.

Meghan Sharp

For my design approach, I decided I wanted to use a simple gate fold and split on image in half for the front cover. I wanted to do this because I thought it would really drawn in the reader to want to open the invitation to  see what it was all about. Then after opening the invitation I wanted to keep it balanced so I put two images on both ends and the in the middle the information for the event. I really thought this was clean, balanced and well organized idea.

For the paper, I wanted the images to look crisp and bright, so I wanted a nice white. After looking through the samples in class I decided if I was able to, I would use Pearl White 64lb – #90 – Crane’s Signature Collection. I thought that this would really give me a nice crisp image and make my invitation nice an strong.

From this project I learned a lot about document size in Indeisgn and a lot more about folds. I also learned a lot about how to create and doubled sided image on one piece of paper. I also learned a lot more about digital printing, especially with having to deal with Staples.

The typeface I used for this project was Gill Sans

Design Approach:

For this project i began simply by finding a movement that well moved me. This lead me focus on Black Lives Matter and so sparked an idea. It is minorities that go through this problem and so marketing to higher income citizens wouldn’t really benefit me a lot. I wanted to target people with an income around the ages of 18 – 50. This bag is meant to be more aggressive visually and be a symbol for minorities to rally behind. The first design item I worked on was the smaller side panels. Here I decided to stick with what cops who have shot a innocent person usually say. “I was scared for my safety I have to shoot”. Also for the larger panels I wanted an image that would depict the situation so I sketched up a few cops aiming a gun at a civilian with his hands up. I wanted to take a step further so on the opposite side of the bag I placed a a baby crawling with the hoard of cops aiming their guns at him. I felt for the bag to keep its consistency all visual elements show be silhouettes.

What I learned:

First thing I learned is how hard it is to make the bag work all around with no start and end. This was the most challenging part of it all. Secondly I learned how you have to really take your time with the blade or you will mess up or worse cut yourself. For the less technical things I learned was how sometimes being simple is better then having extremely loud design elements. Being loud is usually is my style so being able to take a step back now and be simple is really useful.

Typeface:

I used helvetica for my typeface.

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Danisa Valdez

Design Approach: When I first made sketches for this project I had about 10 different designs. I made 5 gate fold sketches and 5 double gate fold sketches. I really liked the images that were available so my sketches had many images on them. When I first started designing on the computer, I realized that most of my ideas weren’t going to work out as well I though. There was one sketch that I made (which I ended up using) that had 3 pictures on one fold, a picture of the garbage truck in the snow (my favorite) in the middle and words on the other fold. It was my favorite sketch and I knew it was going to work. When I put the images and text in the appropriate folds, my idea came to life. With the proper duotones and organization of the different colors, I thought it was best to alternate the grayscale and pantone.The three images on the fold were grayscale, pantone and grayscale, the large one in the middle was grayscale and the text to the right was pantone. My pantone color was a mixture of black and gold; although I wanted a metallic gold, the paper and printer did not give me that option so I created various tones of the pantone to make such pictures slightly lighter than others. The layout on the second fold has the subtitle on the top and 4 pantone images of different workers faces. With that, I wanted to create the illusion of a (still) slideshow, a preview of whats to come afterwards with several pictures of welcoming faces. I used the negative black space underneath to my advantage and put the information on the bottom right corner with the date several points larger than the rest of the text. On the front page,I simply put the title in caps and the image of a garbage bag being through in a dumpster, both pantone colors. My approach was mainly to keep it as simple as possible by mostly only using the organization of colors and size.

Paper Choice: I liked ‘Classic Crest- recycled natural white 80C classically permanent classic crest cover’ because of the texture and the matte feel and look. I thought that the matte was a good fit for the simplistic feeling I was trying to achieve. I also liked ‘Classic Laid- classic laid cover peppered moss 80C foil stamp’ because the paper had a unique feel to it and also the foil stamp; I think my invitation would look complete if the words ‘SanMen’ (which are vertically written) were in the form of a foil stamp, to bring out the gold color and the meaning behind the message.

Typefaces: I used the typeface Adelle because it I thought that its serifs gave it a more distinguished look.

What I Learned: From this project, I learned that folding and cutting invitations are very difficult. They require a lot of detail and a focused eye. The organization of colors and size and typefaces make a big impact when a viewer is seeing it for the first time and in this case, whether they decide to go to the event or not.  I also learned the minimum size that USPS accepts to be delivered through their system.