During my placement year I was involved in a range of projects, each with its own tasks and roles for me to fulfil. What follows are a few of them that highlight how different the tasks were.
When Essence was chosen to design Ryman’s new website they were considering using an actual Ryman plastic bag for the shopping basket, which I was tasked with designing. They liked the design a lot, but felt it didn’t fit the style of the page and went for a more traditional “string-handle bag” styled icon.
Ryman Bag
The Ryman project also saw me tasked with using the homepage designed by a Design & Build member and applying its style to pages that only had wireframes as well as pages that had nothing created yet. At times I was asked to design new features as well as icons.
Product Page
This image shows the original wireframe for the product page and how it looked after designing it.
Icons
Some of the icons that I created for the website.
When my placement company wanted to give a T-Shirt to some Google Chrome employees that they did some work with I was asked to design the front and back of it. After bouncing a few ideas around, the creative team and I decided it should be a "band tour" styled t-shirt, featuring the list of locations, websites and names involved in the project. Since it involved music I decided to create a chrome headphones illustration for the front and chrome microphone illustration for the back, which is shown below. The graphics use the old Chrome logo since the T-shirt was created before Google changed it.
Google Chrome Headphones
Google Chrome Microphone
Since the campaign Essence did with Google chrome involved buttons (created by other members of the creative team) we decided to use them in place of words in famous song titles, such as “PLAY that funky music white boy” and so forth.
The T-Shirt
This image shows the front and back of the shirt.
When Essence did some advertising campaigns for eHarmony we first brainstormed ideas on how to reach the target demographic. For one of the ads we decided on using past children’s games and settled on the idea of a chatterbox since it involves guessing and relates to the tagline of “Dating can sometimes feel like a guessing game”. I was tasked with designing the banner (with a workmate doing the coding) for the standard 300x250 size and then resizing it to various other sizes. The faces on the chatterbox are taken from real eHarmony users that have been featured in their campaigns and were originally drawn in high detail (using Adobe Flash) but were reduced in quality afterwards to meet the 35kb limitation. The flash banner is viewable here (at my very dated DeviantArt account since Behance doesn’t allow interactive Flash embeds).
