PACKAGING YOURSELF

Brief

In this assignment you will use vectors to create an illustration of an original product box with graphically designed packaging, such as a soap box, cornflake box, washing powder box etc, substituting your name for the product name.

You will research the context of your design before you begin the design process.

You will use a range of Adobe illustrator techniques and processes to make the image of the box in a three dimensional space, then you will rework and resave your file into other sizes and formats for various forms of output.

Research package product design and graphic design.

Research the use of flat colours and gradients in this kind of design. Choose one or two product designs and focus on the way they work. Investigate and itemise the colours of different elements in the design and their relationship to one another. Create sets of swatches which work in similar ways to the colours of the design you are looking at.

Make particular study of the typographic elements:

How are the faces arranged and separated by function in the design?

Which colours are repeated and how does the work of the coloured typefaces differ from that of the black printed text?

How is the logo strengthened in typographic and graphic design?

How many distinct font faces and weights are used?

Create a box with your name as the brand

Create a comparative brand identity to the design you have studied. Do not exactly replicate this design but generate a new one which works in a similar way and adopts similar values and formulations. You should mimic the parts and functions of the packaging designs you have researched e.g. appropriate strap line, product details, serials, bar coding etc but not exactly replicate them in their particular, unique, forms.

Build a scaled down version of the package you have researched. Create six individual faces for the six sides of the box, then create a 3D representation of your package. Create a backdrop with a blended shadow to present the 3D representation of the box.

Use a range of Illustrator techniques to create the designs for your box sides, including: blends, appearances, masking, outlining, transforming, pathfinder filters, clipping groups, filters, effects and styles

Save all versions of working files and produce a folder of six finished flat sides in .AI and PDF formats. The PDFs should be print friendly, i.e. high quality A4 PDF files.

In the end...

I have finished all 3 panorama's! I have learned a ridiculous amount of skills during this project. I hardly new how to use Photoshop before and slowly throughout this project I have been picking skills up, I now feel so much more confident with all the practice!
Its taken a lot of work especially as I had to take 5 panorama's! I am really pleased with the overall project though, maybe not so much with the garden QTVR but I love the other two...

I would love to try this again in the future, maybe just the panoramas, I think they would look great printed....although a tad expensive.

THE MAKING...

To begin with I needed to get hold of a tripod, stand in my location (A garden, a flat and a train carriage) and take photographs all around me, slowing turning the tripod so each image will be overlapped...

I then had to put them in order in Photoshop, making each image a different layer, and line them up roughly. This was made easier by dropping the opacity on the layer you move, so you can align objects shown through the layer underneath...

I then went through each layer and added an adjustment layer, mainly to adjust the brightness and contrast to match with the next image...

I was then left with a line wherever a new layer begun, although it helped a great deal playing with the brightness I then had to add a layer mask. A layer mask allows you to mask out parts of a layer and reveal the layer underneath, you can blend them together until you no longer see a line...Blending took me a long time on all 3 images, sometimes I masked to much a layer away and had to start again, you have to be very gentle and soft with it.

I then had to flatten the image, find a sensible point in the panorama which I could cut and match up easily (eg. something like a plain white wall) Make a selection to where I want to split it, make that selection a layer and make the other half a layer the swap them round so the ends were now in the middle. This is where I found a lot of problems...

With two of my images (garden and train) the ends didn't match up at all. As I was turning the tripod it was slowly moving down as I went (as happened with two other images I had to discard) this meant that I had to crop quite a lot out of the image and also a lot of playing around with the ends (mainly warping as shown in a previous post) But, in the garden panorama I made a selection and copied it into a new layer on top (see below)
I then had to warp this layer so that the lines matched up and with a bit a blending it was starting to look better. Although this part was the hardest of the whole project and I'm still really not happy with it.

When I was happy with the images, I saved a jpeg and I had to use a program called Sticher to convert the panorama to a working QTVR, this was a very quick and simple exercise and there I had my QTVR!

My theme and location...

I have chosen the theme 'Alone', Originally I wanted to do a kind of 'Hide and seek' type thing, almost the opposite of 'Wheres Wally', but I feel it will be a lot more interesting with a person obviously in it without trying to find them. So I have picked 'Alone', it will be a lot easier than having a crowd in the picture and more to look at than having no one...

My 3 locations are; Alone in the living room, Alone in the Garden and Alone traveling...

My other two were outside in a playground and a landscape sitting by a lake but unfortunately these didn't work (As shown a couple of posts ago)

The only Panorama that I haven't had a problem with is the Living Room one, the other two I have still had problems lining up the ends because of Parallax...

I have had to use warping for this (see below)

QTVR Research

QTVR's are used for many different types of companies such as; schools/colleges/universities, property sites, health clubs/gyms, tourism, events, hospitals/health care and other public amenities. They are all very useful to go on websites for the above list, it allows the viewer to take a virtual tour before they visit the site in person... Here are some examples...
College
Property
Events
Health Club
Tourism

QTVR's are becoming more and more popular with the web everyday. There are even some agencies who only specialize in the making of QTVR's
QTVR.DK
EYE REVOLUTION

The same sort of thing happened with this Landscape Panorama. Its a real shame as this one could have looked the best :( I think its was the grass I was taking it on, although there was a spirit level in the tripod...so who knows?!

I ended up giving up on it...The 3 photo's I have ended up using are all on solid flat ground which in the future I will definitely try and stick too!

Progress...

So... I ended up having to take 5 Panoramic Photographs... Some of them have either not lined up (Due to Tripod) Or are just to complicated! Like the one below of the Playground...
I didn't think about this one properly, the railings would just take so much time, which I wouldn't have minded if the photos hadn't started to slope.

As you can see below the ends are completely different which obviously means the whole image is sloping from the start (Parallax), this would have taken a lot of
warping!