Choosing fonts for my product and brand

Choosing a font for my brand names!

Started off by sketching out some font ideas...

So I typed out the product names over and over and started changing the fonts to things I liked the look of! I had a whole page full of the word "Fresh" which ended up really confusing me because it didn't look like it was spelt correctly in the end! I had seen the word so much it had become unrecognisable to me...weird!

I then narrowed down the list by getting rid of the fonts I liked the least. When I had a sufficiently sized list I added the words "Citrus" and "Zest" in the same fonts that I'd chosen to keep. Below is a screenshot of the four fonts I liked most.

1. I liked this font because it was quite flowing and a bit like funky handwriting
2. I think this font is quite Art Deco and I like it because it's bold and geometric
3. This one is also very Art Deco and I like it, but I'm not so sure about the fact that it has no inner colour so isn't very bold and won't stand out from my packaging and from other competitors products
4. I liked how the first letters are really big and stand out

innovative packaging

Idea focus

I've changed my mind! I like Fresh, Zest and Citrus but I don't like the brand name Breathe Deep... but I do like the name 'hmm...'

I want to go for something a little like this:

For the logo for my brand I'm thinking something along these lines.. like a scent cloud?

Raphael & Renaissance painting

Raphael Self Portrait

Raphael 1483 - 1520

" Raffaello Sanzio da Urbino, known as Raphael, was an Italian painter and architect of the High Renaissance. His work is admired for its clarity of form, ease of composition, and visual achievement of the Neoplatonic ideal of human grandeur. Together with Michaelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci, he forms the traditional trinity of great masters of that period.

Raphael was enormously productive, running an unusually large workshop and, despite his death at 37, leaving a large body of work."

- Raphael was a high renaissance painter.

- Perspective in art developed during the Renaissance.

- Other techniques to make things look more realistic were also developed.

- The scenes in the work are very posed.

- Perspective rules: horizon lines, center points/focal points (usually a religious figure), eyes of painted people follow to certain points.

- Compositional routes, staged to create structure, to guide the viewer's eye to a certain point.

In the painting below, you can see that the line of vision for the painted characters goes directly through their hands to look at the person on the ground, a.k.a. the focal point of the painting. Everything in the painting is set out to draw your eyes to the character on the floor. The paint style is very gaudy, with bright colours in the foreground to bring your focus to the characters, rather than the background, which is basically there so that the canvas isn't blank. The whose scene looks posed, the two female characters are framing the male character on the floor using their postures and body language. This scene doesn't look realistic for many reasons, hence the Pre-Raphaelites preferring to use 'pre-Raphael' techniques to create more realistic paintings.

An Allegory ('Vision of a Knight'), Raphael, approx 1504

I personally don't like this work, in case you hadn't guessed! I think it looks very fake and doesn't appeal to me at all, but each to their own.

The Garvagh Madonna, Raphael, 1509-10

Again, notice how the lines of vision pass through the hands, how the painting seems posed and the colours in the foreground are bright and gaudy. To me, the figures are painted in a very soft way, for example there's minimal detail, like there's tone, but not detail. I can't describe it, it's like the faces are just soft, like ooh they're perfect and their skin tone is flawless..I don't know how else to describe it! It just looks fake. I don't particularly like the Pre-Raphaelite style but I hands down prefer it to this work. Below are some more examples anyway...just in case you're still interested.

Saint John the Baptist Preaching, Raphael, 1505

The Ansidei Madonna, Raphael, 1505

The Mond Crucifixion, Raphael, 1502-3

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raphael

http://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/artists/raphael

Pre-Raphaelites, religious & hidden connotations

http://www.tate.org.uk/context-comment/blogs/why-were-pre-raphaelites-so-shocking

"Paintings by the Pre-Raphaelites are amongst the best-loved in Tate’s collection. But they were not always considered to be uncomplicatedly beautiful images – on the contrary, when they were first painted in the mid 19th century they were regarded as assaults on the eye, objectionable in terms of their realism and morally shocking.
Charles Dickens was one deprecator. He described the figure of the Virgin Mary in John Everett Millais’s Christ in the House of His Parents as a degenerate type, one who was ‘horrible in her ugliness’.
Whereas other artists tended to idealise religious figures, the Pre-Raphaelites painted them with unprecedented realism, attending to peculiarities of physiognomy and character, so people read them in terms of the model rather than in terms of the person that particular model was impersonating. Sometimes the artist’s approach was considered sacrilegious or even blasphemous, as was the case with Millais’s Christ in the House of His Parents.
The artists used bright colours so their pictures stood out against other works in an exhibition, demanding people’s attention. The Pre-Raphaelites were self-publicists, seeking controversy and attention.
A lot of the themes they chose to depict were quite daring for the time – including problematic subjects such as poverty, emigration, prostitution and the double standard of sexual morality in society. Their pictures require a lot of concentrated reading and are so densely encoded with signs and symbols that you have to work hard at deciphering them.

A good example is The Awakening Conscience by William Holman Hunt. At first glance this could be seen to represent a young married couple or perhaps a brother and sister playing a game. However on closer inspection the different signs cohere to suggest a narrative of fall and possible redemption. The woman is presented in a state if half dress and isn’t wearing a wedding ring, which would imply that she is the man’s mistress. His fallen glove hints at her fate as a discarded mistress, but the light falling into the room from the garden suggests salvation."

The Pre-Raphaelites were heavily criticised for many things concerning religion, including;
- Using a ginger model (Lizzie Siddal) as being ginger was still associated with witchcraft at this time, and using Lizzie as a model for the Virgin Mary and painting true to the model rather than the character of Mary meant they were criticised for being blasphemous
- Also the picture at the top, of Mary and Jesus along with others was criticised because the Pre-Raphaelites had made the religious icons look "ugly", which again is blasphemous and created some problems

Jane Morris; Wife to William, mistress to Rossetti and muse for them both

While researching Lizzie Siddal, I found this site...

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-2545376/Rival-Lizzie-Siddal-mistress-Rossetti-wife-William-Morris-fascinating-life-Pre-Raphaelite-muse-Jane-Burden-revealed.html

It's about a woman named Jane Burden, who was another Pre-Raphaelite model, the wife of William Morris and the mistress of Rossetti!

"She was the famous beauty who captured the heart of one of the UK's best-loved artists but unlike her contemporary, Lizzie Siddal, few remember Jade Burden today. And yet, the story of Jane Burden, later Morris, the beautiful stablehand's daughter who went on to appear in some of the world's most famous paintings, is just as fascinating."

Portrait of Jane Burden by Rossetti, 1881

"Although Jade Burden didn't share Siddal's tawny colouring, she did match her for beauty."

When she was 18 she was spotted outside Oxford's Drury Theatre by Edward Burne-Jones and Gabriel Dante Rossetti. "The pair were enraptured by her beauty"

Jane Burden was smitten with Rossetti, but he was engaged to Siddal, and didn't reciprocate the feelings. So instead she became engaged to his friend, William Morris, whom she went on to marry in 1859 and had 2 daughters with.

"Despite her humble background, the new Mrs Morris had few problems fitting into upper class society, refining her accent to the point where friends described it as 'queenly' and later inspiring Vernon Lee's 1884 novel 'Miss Brown', which in turn inspired the musical and film, 'My Fair Lady'.

But although she and Morris appear to have been happy, Rossetti remained in the background and after Siddal's death, their affair began in earnest. The relationship would last, off and on, until his death in 1882, and she would go on to star in some of his most famous works. After his death, she embarked on an affair with poet and political activist Wilfred Scawen Blunt that endured until 1894."

In 1896 William Morris died, leaving Jane to live for a further 16 years, until she died peacefully aged 75 on 26th January 1914 in Bath.

"Muse, model and romantic, Jane's death might have been a conventional one but her life was anything but."



Tate: Rossetti's muses and love life
http://www.tate.org.uk/context-comment/blogs/discovering-rossettis-women

The Running Jumping & Standing Still Film and Monty Python

The Running Jumping & Standing Still Film
- 11 minutes long
- Directed by Richard Lester and Peter Sellers, in collaboration with Bruce Lacey
- Released in 1959
- Cost around £70 to make, including £5 to hire the field
- Filmed over 2 Sundays
- Slapstick comedy
- "Director Richard Lester first worked with Peter Sellers and Spike Milligan on three television series, The Idiot Weekly Price 2d, A show called Fred and Son of Fred (all ITV, 1956), each of them an early attempt to transfer the surreal humour of radio's The Goon Show to a visual medium."
- "While the style of comedy may be very much of it's time, the film's employment of visual humour clearly owes a significant debt to silent cinema, with the sepia tint serving to reinforce the sense of homage (although sepia is a property of early photography, not cinema). This deliberate archaism is underpinned by the preponderance of late-Victorian / Edwardian clothing and props: top hats, plus fours, deerstalkers, a gramophone and a plate camera."
- "The film's lasting legacy, however, was its influence (as part of Milligan's overall body of work) on British comedy in general, and on Monty Python's Flying Circus (BBC, 1969-74) in particular. This is evident not only in its surreal humour, but in the way that elements of one routine are threaded through subsequent scenes, transcending the stand-alone sketch form - a tactic subsequently favoured by the Python team."

The link below leads to a clip of 'The Running Jumping and Standing Still film'. Blogger wouldn't let me upload the video on here and I can't find a full version of the film, only parodies and tribute videos!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UTmaQdmtfok

Below is a video showing Monty Python's Flying Circus Top Ten Moments, to give you a bit of an idea about how weird and surreal Monty Python is!

Links to pages I've looked at for info:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Running_Jumping_%26_Standing_Still_Film

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0053231/

http://www.screenonline.org.uk/film/id/471274/index.html

http://dangerousminds.net/comments/peter_sellers_vs._spike_milligan_the_running_jumping_standing_still_film_19

Un Chien Andalou de Luis Bunuel / Surrealism

Un Chein Andalou
- Translates in English to 'An Andalusian Dog'
- 1929 silent surrealist short film
- Bunuel's first film
- The film has no plot in the conventional sense of the word.
- The film isn't chronological, jumping from the initial "once upon a time" to "eight years later" without the events or characters changing very much.
- Uses dream logic in a narrative flow (Freudian free association)

Synopsis (of scene one)
"The film opens with a title card reading "Once upon a time". A middle-aged man (Luis Bunuel) sharpens his razor at his balcony door and tests the razor on his thumb. He then opens the door, and idly fingers the razor while gazing at the moon, about to be engulfed by a thin cloud, from his balcony. There is a cut to a close-up of a young woman (Simone Mareuil) being held by the man as she calmly stares straight ahead. Another cut to the moon being overcome by the cloud as the man slits the eye of a calf with the razor, and the vitreous humour spills out from it. Visually, the suggestion seems to be that it's the woman's eye that's been cut."

The idea for the film began when Bunuel was working as an assistant director for Jean Epstein in France. Bunuel told Dali at a restaurant one day about a dream in which a cloud sliced the moon in half "like a razor blade slicing through an eye". Dali responded that he'd dreamed about a hand crawling with ants. Excitedly, Bunuel declared: "There's the film, let's go an make it." They were fascinated by what the psyche could create, and decided to write a script based on the concept of suppressed human emotions.

Luis Bunuel

In deliberate contrast to the approach taken by Jean Epstein and his peers, which was to never leave anything in their work to chance, with every aesthetic decision having a rational explanation and fitting clearly into the whole, Bunuel made it clear throughout his writings that, between Dali and himself, the only rule for the writing of the script was: "No idea or image that might lend itself to a rational explanation of any kind would be accepted." He also stated: "Nothing, in the film, symbolizes anything. The only method of investigation of the symbols would be, perhaps, psychoanalysis."

Film scholar Ken Dancyger has argued that Un Chien Andalou might be the genesis of the filmmaking style present in the modern music video. Roger Ebert had called it the inspiration for low budget independant films.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Un_Chien_Andalou

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0020530/

Baroness Elsa Von Freytag-Loringhoven / Dada

Baroness Elsa Von Freytag-Loringhoven
- One word...nutcase!
- Born 1874, died 1927
- German
- Avant-garde, Dada artist and poet
- She suggested the idea of 'Fountain' to Duchamp
- She died mysteriously next to her lapdog from a gas leak in her flat in Paris
- She was a self proclaimed anarchist
- She found what she wore, from shower curtain rings as bracelets to postage stamps as beauty marks
- She was a living Dada artwork. She quite literally LIVED Dada.
- She took 1920s flapper-esque fashion and distorted it
- She wore tin can bras and carried her tiny mangy dog like an accessory to poke fun at upper crust notions of breeding.
- "The Baroness is not a Futurist. She is the future." quote from Marcel Duchamp.
- Undervalued precursor to the feminist punk movement of the 1990s and even conceptual pop artist Lady Gaga.
- "She challenged cultural and gender norms through her art, writing, 'artistic clothes' and her daily interaction with people."
- "She is described variously with half shaved head, dyed hair, spoons dangling from her ears, postage stamps stuck on her cheeks, sporting a bra made out of tomato cans and bracelets made out of stolen curtain rings, In this way she used her body to address the commodification of femininity in its extremity."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elsa_von_Freytag-Loringhoven

http://www.interviewmagazine.com/fashion/obsession-baroness-elsa-von-freytag-loringhoven#_

http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Elsa_von_Freytag-Loringhoven

http://www.influxpress.com/the-anti-canon-baroness-elsa-von-freytag-loringhoven-and-the-principle-of-non-acquiescence-by-kyra-hanson/

Alfred Jarry / Absurdism

Alfred Jarry

- French writer, best known for his play Ubu Roi (1896)
- Ubu Roi known as forerunner to Surrealist and Futurist movements
- Ubu Roi is sometimes translated to 'King Turd', however, the word 'Ubu' is a nonsense word that evolved from the French pronunciation of the name 'Herbert'.
- Herbert was the name of one of Jarry's teachers and the target and inspiration for the first versions of the play.
- People didn't like Ubu Roi, they considered it crude, vulgar and low, and very controversial!
- When it premiered in Paris it was booed for the first 15 minutes after the first word was spoken, which was "Merdre!" This word is deliberately close the the French word "merde" which translates to English as "shit". https://translate.google.co.uk/?hl=en&tab=wT#fr/en/merde
- The play was accused of being politically subversive, the work of an anarchist.
- Jarry didn't care at all, he gave characters names such as "MacNure", "Pissweet" and "Pissale".
- For Jarry, the point was to piss the audience off, to be confrontational, to getunder their skin and wind them up.
- Ubu's scepter was a "shit-smeared toilet brush".
- Ubu Roi is Absurdism, which Jarry pretty much created himself.
- Dada led on from this Absurdism movement



http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ubu_Roi

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_Jarry
http://dangerousminds.net/comments/the_original_theatre_of_the_absurd_ubu_roi_a_lot_like_the_forbidden_zone

Herbal Remedy Packaging

I'm going to have to package my product...so here are some images of packaging for herbal remedy products, like mine!

^ very feminine design, aimed at females obviously, colour coded, photographic image that's been manipulated, consistency throughout design (font, layout, theme, images etc)

^ interesting way to open the product (pull right side and both ends are released), simple design, informational booklet, simple colour scheme, 'Kalms' rather than calms- using a word related to the nature of the product

^ herbs in a tin is a nice idea, kinda similar to what I'd like to create, only I want mine to be a bottle of scented liquid, simple design, maybe a bit too boring, female orientated design, simple colour scheme

^ I think these are really cool! Very modern and funky, simple yet quirky. Consistent throughout designs. Easy to remember the brand name. Colour coded. Layout is simple, clear and consistent. Compact tins, pocket / handbag friendly.

^ Love these, quirky and modern, but the text is a bit Aztec in style, which I like. numbers to show range of products, consistent design style, bright colours.

^ really like the quirky packaging of these, how the three bits at the top fold in, like the logo. simple layout of text / imagery. consistent design style. simple and minimal colour scheme.

^ consistent designs, colour coded, simple colour schemes- not too many colours on each bottle, logo on bottle top, there's no label as such on the bottles, they are completely decorated so you cannot see what's inside.

^ simple and effective designs, colour coded, plain packaging, normal box, simple colour scheme, consistent design style, maybe a bit too plain, not that much going on

^ I really like this packaging! So innovative, tea bags in a teepee, shaped like a teepee! Even when you remove the packaging, the tea bag is still shaped like a teepee, and the sticks at the top are an easy way to hold the tea bag and remove it from it's packaging. Consistent design style. Colour coded. Simple design on the packaging but the quirkiness of the actual box makes up for it.

^ bright colours, plain box design, bold text, minimal text, play on words (kinda) to make viewer laugh.

^ Sleek designs, plain but with bold, bright coloured text that stands out. Consistency throughout designs. Male appeal - not too much going on, stand out, no hassle. Colour coded. Minimal design.

^ not really herbal remedy packaging but I liked it! Quirky way to dispense chewing gum / bubble gum. Funny name- 'Gubble Bum', playing on the words bubble gum...duh. Simple and few colours. Bright and stands out. Quirky faces on packets. Plain boxes. Minimal text on fronts of packets.

^ Look a bit like tablets, but in a more quirky container. I think the corks are quite cute, so might use this idea in my designs. Not a lot else to comment on really... /:

^ Fun way to dispense tablets, though my product isn't tablets, I still liked this idea. Maybe a pyramid shaped box? Bright colours, all fit together, clearly labelled...kind of reminds me of an advent calender /:

^ Consistency throughout designs. Colour coded. Simple, clear designs, quite plain. Logo is consistent, just changes colour with each product. Layout is consistent. Clear and precise info on front to keep things simple. Plain rectangular box. I like these because I think they look very professional and simple yet effective. Logo relates to nature of product (quite literally...nature).

^ These little jam jars are really cute, not really herbal remedies but I liked the packaging theme! Jam in individual jars and packaged in what looks like brown paper and string, though is probably cardboard. Very cutesy and old fashioned looking, maybe aimed more at older women.

^ These are nice, very light colours so seem bright and positive. Labels on jars look like real labels, with plenty of info on. Colour scheme works well. Tone of the grey colour varies depending on the strength of the product - the word 'milky' is lighter in colour than the word 'strong'. I'm puzzled as to what these are... from the names I'm thinking maybe something you dissolve in a drink? Or are they sweets because that's what they look like? I don't know...