YCN... shop front

My initial shop front design, although I still need to consider mannequins and window displays.

YCN... Logo development

I have started to develop a logo to be displayed on the store front. It will be a combination of the Lola&Grace logo and the elegant feel of the House of Herlihy brand.

YCN... store front

I have started on the design for the shop front. My idea is to merge the two brands Lola&Grace and House of Herlihy. I don't want to change the names, as the two shops will still stand alone, this collaboration being just an additional factor and boost to both brands. My initial instincts are to keep it quite simplistic and use a lot of white, just as it is in the House of Herlihy branding, adding splashes of colour to communicate the Lola&Grace brand and add an element of fun to the shop.

Here are some fonts I was thinking to go alongside the Lola&Grace logo. I thought the hand written look would make it look like its an addition to the existing store and keep with the elegant feel.

YCN... Packaging

This morning I received a text from Sinead saying that she got jewellery samples and she had arrived at the shoot. She's going to let us know how it goes and we are going to meet on Monday to discuss the progress of this brief.

Today me and Baljeet made the final mock ups of the packaging and they are looking great. We also made a rough bag to see how it looks with the boxes before printing. We have a slot booked with James on Monday and will photograph the whole set together after that. The boxes have some small imperfections, but we will Photoshop these out before sending off to Lola&Grace for our next proposal.

For the top of the packaging we decided to include the pink ampersand, as it is a key element of their branding. We had to vector our own as we couldn't find an image large enough.

We have included both the Lola&Grace and MCR fashion week logos on a swing tag, to signify that it is a limited edition packaging specifically for this event.

YCN... Jewellery samples

Today I got a phone call from Yellowdoor, Lola&Graces PR company and they informed me that they are taking us up on our offer to give them trading space at MCR fashion week in return for lending us some jewellery samples. This is absolutely amazing news and they even reassured me that the samples will arrive before 9am tomorrow morning, in time for Sinead's photo shoot. I love it when a plan comes together!

I emailed the manager of the Lola&Grace store to say thank you for her support and helping to make it all happen.

YCN... packaging

Today me and Baljeet shared the pattern designs that we did last night. To see how they will work we printed them off and added them to the packaging. I think they all look great, but we decided to narrow it down to four different types so that they can vary throughout the goody bags.

We aso made a trip into town to buy some supplies to make the final boxes and bags out of. We bought black string for the handles of the bag, thicker card to make the boxes and white tissue pape to put inside the boxes. Tomorrow we are going to make the finals.

Open publication - Free publishing

YCN... patterns

Me and Baljeet agreed that the original patterns that we each created on Illustrator didn't work with our idea of what the packaging should look like. We have taken inspiration from an artist that was featured on Lola&Graces blog, Ramzi Musa. I really like his style of work and think that if we combine it with the style of the jewellery it could work really well.

Here is what I came up with.

I altered the colours in Photoshop and made it into a repeat pattern on Illustrator. I made the colours on the floral pattern more red and pink to suit the Lola&grace brand. I also altered the colours on the crystal pattern, I prefer the purple to the grey colour and I think it will work a lot better.

Here are Baljeet's final patterns.

There has been a massive problem with file size after having to make them into repeat patterns. Each full page has taken about 40 minutes to print off. I think this is because we edited the single image on Photoshop, and then repeating it in Illustrator just multiplied the file size. Unfortunately saving the file as a jpeg just means that the quality of the image is lost.

To solve this, after printing each pattern off once (which took a looong time!) we scanned them in, which managed to retain the quality of each one.