Designing the Touchpoints
Lesson 17 from: Graphic Design Fundamentals: Getting StartedTimothy Samara
Designing the Touchpoints
Lesson 17 from: Graphic Design Fundamentals: Getting StartedTimothy Samara
Lesson Info
17. Designing the Touchpoints
Lessons
Introduction to Graphic Design
11:27 2Graphic Design: Areas of Specialization
14:10 3The History of Graphic Design
40:12 4The Designer's Toolkit
11:30 5The Graphic Designer's Tools: Color
06:01 6The Graphic Designers Tools: Typography
01:42 7The Graphic Designer's Tools: Layout & Space
06:33 8Typical Work Processes
09:14Designing an Advertisment
41:46 10Designing a Poster
29:20 11Designing a Book Layout: Basic Concepts
36:02 12Designing a Book Layout: The Details
20:55 13Designing a Website
26:54 14How to Design a Brand Identity: Preperation
25:42 15How to Design Brand Identity: Showing the Client
18:25 16Building Brand Language
14:12 17Designing the Touchpoints
11:16 18Fundamentals are Forever
03:40Lesson Info
Designing the Touchpoints
And so, you know that system, informs all the parts. The brand lives in the real world. In printed form, in digital form, in materials that she shows to groups and materials that she gives out to others. And those things are referred to often as touchpoints or applications. They are the point at which the brand touches the consumer or the audience. Whether it's a business card or a form or a letterhead, an invoice, the side of a truck delivering things, the packaging that the product is in. All of these things are points of contact where the consumer, the audience, the public begins to kind of have a dialogue, sort of a, family talk with the client in a certain way. They become aware of the client through certain avenues, whether it's advertising on the web, from there, they're directed to some other piece of information that they need, they're brought continually deeper and deeper into a close knit kind of association with the brand itself. It's where we can now talk about brands as p...
eople, but even though they're not, but they are entities. They have kind of a presence. And that's what you want, you want the audience to know why they're going to that brand for what they're offering. You want them to like going there, you want the audience to feel as though they are valued, that the brand or the company is actually talking to them, is helping make their life better in some way, is adding to their experience as humans, and that you're building a relationship, and a narrative that will just continually grow over time. So these are the touchpoints that are in existence. Now, first is the stationery. This is the letterhead. Using one of the engravings as kind of a watermark. This is a folder. The folder was originally intended to be the same coloration with a full bleed of that image on the inside. But for budgetary reasons, we had to find an existing off the rack folder and began to, and customized it with a sticker. And the other side of the stickers here folds around and holds a print of that engraving collage as a kind of an internal fly sheet which was much easier, much cheaper to print. And also could be folded down to become the envelope. So we actually got two pieces of the stationery out of one print run and was able to achieve the same kind of effect which was this full bleed sort of rich, lush background image without having to actually make a real folder out of it. These are the envelope. And so when it's folded down, you open the envelope and that image is on the inside. You see here the application of the tagline one the lower part of the envelope. This is the business card, front and back. It's printed, now again, three colors, so this is much more accurate in terms of that color, that third corporate color, this kind of, sort of pale muted yellow green. The backside is surprinting where you get a little bit more of the kind of the blue violet out of the tones, as those two ink colors come into contact with each other. And then one thing that was really important was to develop a presentation that she would make to interested or concerned groups. And in that presentation we really started to look at messing around with imagery. So we had the, we had the engravings as a kind of a backdrop, this is the backbone of the visual language for the brand. But we also started to look at more symbolic and playful kinds of image use in the presentation. One for emotional value, and two because, her personality is actually kind of a lot like mine, she's very sort of bouncy, kind of very friendly, she speaks with a lot of passion, she goes off on tangents all the time. And she talks to audiences very much like she's talking to a friend. So we wanted to bring some of that personality, but she's also, you know, she's very confrontational. And she's presenting information that a lot of people are going to be taken aback by, in terms of some facts about food. So, this is the presentation, this is the title screen. And so I'll just cycle through these. It begins with this, going directly to black using that accent face to deliver sort of shocking bit of information. And then jumps to this. And then these are statistics about livestock production, about nutritional elements in foods. And as it cycles through, there're about 40 or of these, the background type begins to fade out. This talks about the relationship between tobacco and sugar. And asks the question. And then it launches into a series of sort of shocking facts, or misconceptions in a true false sort of game. And so the first one is milk builds strong bones. Which is false. And so by breaking the image apart and fracturing it, the idea of bone fracture is kind of thrown out there. That is what strong bones or calcium or drinking milk is supposed to aid against. And then there's a fact that follows it. So as soon as she debunks the myth, she gives you the evidence and then moves onto the next one. So we being to get a little bit playful. Because a fish is more like a cow in terms of saturated fat, which many people do not know. And then after about 10 or 15 of those, by which time the audience is totally inflamed, she returns to a kind of a calming session, and that point, you're about halfway through the presentation. And she refers to Hippocrates, the Greek father of modern medicine. And then begins to offer solutions. Where do I start? And then it goes through a series of different kinds of possibilities. There are eight segments to this but I don't have all of them. So here she's talking about getting back in the kitchen and spending less time on the computer and more time actually doing the act of cooking and caring for your nutrition. Facts about chewing. This is a engraving about phrenology which is a pseudo science that developed in the 1800's that tried to map personality traits based on the bumps on your head, which didn't last very long, kind of precursor to psychology or eugenics. I'm jumping there to four. There are other aspects to dealing with nutrition, that there are effects about how you live, stress levels and so on, that affect how your body processes things. And so always this combination of the engravings and this kind of playful image. Interestingly, these are the actual colors of the tags that she found for this slide, which played kind of directly off of their greens and violets and I couldn't have been happier. I couldn't have done that better myself. And sometimes we really played with the treatment. When it made sense to veer away from the strict sort of branding language, we went there because ultimately it's the message that's the most important. It's gonna live in this brand anyway, it's surrounded by it. And then into the kind of final segment. And then into the hard sell at the end, where she outlines what exactly she offers. We're now, completely enveloped in the brand language with the logo as the anchoring point. And then to the website as a kind of a director. The website is still in production but it is designed. But this is what it looks like. So we eventually determined that the silhouetted images were gonna cause a lot of trouble and so we just locked them into a box. This follows the same grid formation as was established for the stationery. Here the little icons being used. This is the primary navigation which is outside of the content area and there's a search function. There is a secondary navigation for brand information, the mission and her bio and the services themselves. And then we developed an advertising system also based on that grid formation. These don't line up here but there you see it happening. And this grid continues all the way across. So depending on what newspaper you're buying in and which part of a page you're buying, is that you use the number of columns that fits that page. And then you determine what the margin is. If the margin doesn't work out, you go to the next column in so you keep the live area, all the material safe from the outer edges if there's gonna be a trim. So basically it was a creation of two zones, one for branding and color and one for image, which could be very flexible, depending on what you wanted. So this would be a kind of an example of, a sort of a purely brand language ad using the brand language only as the image material. And also using the colors of the brand in more or less their primary form. It could also accept photography for a particular campaign or when the mood struck the client. I'd really like to show fresh kale in this image. Okay, we can do that. And then last is an image of her with something that we wrote together that sort of captures her essence as a person and as a personality because the brand is also really kind of wrapped up in her. And that ad was the first one that was produced, just a little website on the bottom, and that's it.
Ratings and Reviews
a Creativelive Student
Wonderful class! I loved getting the info as to the creative process. Great!
Øyvind Hermans
I love this class, clear and precise information with very interesting examples. I have worked as a graphic designer for 6 years but have no design eduction, so at times I feel like there is these gaps of design-knowlegde in my decisions, this was the perfect filler of these gaps.
sixtina maculan
Thank you for sharing your experiences in this class. It's been a pleasure to listen, learn and understand, as well as a wonderful motivation.