The Grown Up Chocolate Company - Visual Approach Research

Throughout our research and ongoing discussion during this collaborative process, me and my collaborative partner have identified multiple different themes that we could follow through on this brief with. We are struggling to decide how we want to represent The Grown Up Chocolate Company in our packaging and the feeling that we want to give the consumer via our packaging. We've decided to look into different visual approaches/styles individually in order to gain better understanding of where we could take this. We will then be meeting up to collate and review our research and decide on a final route to follow.

I find this illustration to be really visually striking. The combination of cut paper, collage and hand drawn elements is really well executed and gives off a very hand made feel. I think the combination of all the textures of the different bits of paper that have been used help give the image more depth, rather than just using pieces of flat coloured paper. I think an approach like this would work well with our brief due to the hand crafted look it has. The Grown Up Chocolate company are proud of being a handmade confectionary company, and following this through with handmade illustrations would fit perfectly. I also think the idea of using different scraps of paper could be made relatable to our brief. Possibly taking this approach and using bits of sweet wrappers/gift wrap would be something to look into? 

Shaped based imagery is a simple yet effective way to make an illustration really stand out. I was drawn to this piece due to its ability to be sophisticated whilst still remain quite playful. I think the elegance is mainly down to the clean cut shapes that have been used to construct the image. The colours used then relax the whole image down a little, giving it a more fun, playful feel. This is also a good way to approach the brief and would fit in well with our target audience. Fun playful chocolate bars for sophisticated adults.

I really feel that collage/cut paper could be a really strong route to go down with this brief. I think it helps that it ties in with The Grown Up Chocolate Company's current use of imagery but allows room for expansion and personalisation, not necessarily just within this brief but also for other products that the company might come out with in the future. I also think that the idea of collage and cut paper could be useful when thinking about the personalisation element of their new product. Would it be possible to create something that the customer could also edit and change? For example if we used collage based illustration, could we make it so that the customer could add their own images into the collage? This is something I will ask my collab partner when we meet up tomorrow. 

I've also been looking at how emrboidery is used within illustration recently. This has kind of sparked another idea, not necessarily using embroidery, but more the idea of 'de-facing' an image. I was thinking that maybe we could create a set of 'stickers' or 'filters' that the customer could apply over their own uploaded image. These stickers would be reminiscent of childhood, possibly looking at face paints? This is a past-time that the majority of people would have engaged in when they were kids and it would be fun to let the customer apply these illustrated face paint stickers over the top of their own image. I think this is a route that we could look at following, especially because it connects with The Grown Up Chocolate Company's idea of childhood, they make chocolate that are the same as the ones you'd eat as children, but with an adult twist, so it'd make sense to look into injecting bit of our childhood back into our adult lives in terms of the packaging as well. 

I think I've got a lot of different ideas and questions to take to my next collar meeting so I'm going to write them down and make sure they're brought up in discussion so that I can blog about it after the meeting. I'm also hoping that at our next session we will be able to get working on the practical aspect of this brief and start assigning tasks for each other to be working on.