Tigerprint Valentines Cards

Tigerprint Brief;
Tiger Print is a competition for Marks and Spencer's. They do a design competition every month, usually greetings cards or surface patterns. This competition was to create hand drawn type and use the words that they have given you to create different cards designs for valentines day. I chose to do this brief as I love greetings cards and think that they are a good way of getting people to communicate. Although this brief has also been produced for bags and gift wrap too. I also thought that this would be a good brief to do as it is a relatively small brief and the other briefs I have started are quite big, so it will be good to do a range. For this brief we had been given the dimensions of the cards, 500 by 500 pixels or 500 by 700 pixels.

I chose to use the words 'Love you. Today. Always. Forever.' I thought that I would use an existing font to work from and change it to make it more appropriate and different when drawing it up myself.

After playing around with different ways to create the hand drawn type I decided that I wanted it to look elegant and romantic as I chose to do valentines cards.

I started to look into the colour theme and how it would be appropriate for the genre I have chosen. Red signifies romance therefore I wanted to use this for the valentines cards.

I tried different variants of these colours to see which I thought looked best and even though I think that the top card looks more like hand drawn type. I think that the red and black variations look more professional and smooth, to make them look less hand rendered. Also having them more basic means that they can be applied on more of a range of products such as bags and gift wrapping.


'Be my valentine?' was the next set of words I decided to work with, I decided that I would put a slight shadow on this hand drawn type to give it more dimension.

I thought about adding some illustrations to this card as my other cards are very type based, I thought that adding some small illustrations so that it would make the design more interesting and give it more context to the question being asked. I digitally created some simple illustrations of a man and a women so that they will relate to people who would want to buy them. Although these have been designed to be used as cards and wouldn't really work if they were used for anything else.

As my original cards would be able to be used for many things, not just greetings cards, I think that I should do more designs that could be used on a range of different things. Keeping the designs mainly type-based will allow the design to be more versatile.

Using the same hand drawn type as before I decided that I would scan it in and change the colours that are being used. Because of the shading on the letters I was able to create this effect with each of the letters. Giving the letters and the shadows an outline makes the type a bit different.

I put the hand drawn type with a small detail on two different colours, this is different variations of the card, although it also shows that it could work on different surfaces and colours. This shows its versatility.

Entering Competition.

When entering the competition I chose to use two of the first variation, two of the third variation and the one with illustration. There was a maximum of five entries per person so I thought I may as well send in five.

Evaluation.
Looking back onto this brief, I initially really liked the hand drawn type that I did because it wasn't too much, or too script which hand drawn type can often become. I think that each of the cards worked well on their own, although as a set I have found that they look slightly tacky. The pink cards work quite well as the colour is appropriate for the genre and theme. Although the red and black cards are a bit too harsh and maybe too much. If I were to do this brief again I would have tried to incorporate some sort of repeated patter as that would go on a range of products. I would have tried some of the other occasions such as, mothers day or birthdays.