Tonari

INDEPENDENT

PRACTISE

GRAPHIC DESIGN Y1 S2 LUCY ROSSELL-EVANS

During my Independent Practise in Term 2 I have decided to focus on the subject of children’s branding - what products are included, which styles are successful, what makes a children’s brand appealling .

I began by brain-storming exactly this, finding that most brands have one or two key characters which the brand is based around.

For the brand that I am creating, I have chosen to centre in around a rag doll / monster character named Tonari, which means neighbour in Japanese. I first sketched out what I wanted him to look like, then tried to transfer my work to Illustrator (on the left hand page).

I also looked at possible fonts for a logo, and then editing them with the Create Outlines tool.

After gaining confidence on Illustrator, I transferred some of my newly learnt skills into designing some stickersfor the Tonari brand.

Some are buttons, and some are praise stickers for parents to give to their childrens if they do a good deed.

After looking at successful brands such as Winne the Pooh and Mr Men I found that the core of the success of a children’s brand is story-telling media animation, illustration or short stories. I decided to create my own series of books about life lessons Tonari learns - which would in turn teach children.

Despite trying my hand in Illustrator, I still feel that hand-drawing is my strongest point. I began to illustrate very short stories about Tonari with watercolour, 0.3 and 0.05 fineliner pens

One of the Tonari books I illustrated was called My Alphabet Book. Her are some images which I scanned into the computer. I was going to edit them but I think the hand-drawn style is quintessential to the idea of the brand. I think the ‘unfinished’ style is memorable and identifyable so that children are more likely to recognise it.

On this double page is a selection of products I half designed, and either gave up because of lack of time or were failures. For example, I really liked the idea of designing a child’s watch for the brand, but finance stood in my way. I also wanted to design a set of key rings, but for the first one that I made I got the scaling wrong, and it was too big. If I organised my time better I think I could have seen more of these products through to finish.

All in all I made four hard-cover, illustrated Tonari books.

I bound them myself, they are made out of recycled (clean) pizza boxes. I had planned to make more, but time only allowed me to make a small amout. The books are simple stories with line illustrations.

The colours I included when creating the products were chosen carefully, apparently pastel colours have a calming effect on children, which would be useful when reading them a book. The down side to this is that bright colours are apparently more memorable, but this doesn’t matter if you are reading a child to sleep.

The way I chose to display the products that I made was to arrange them like they were being put on sale in a shop.

I packaged the bookmarks I made and put price tage on the plush figures and books.

The style I designed the plush toys was quite shabby, reminiscent of Rosie and Jim puppets, Donna Wilson stuffed figures and rag dolls.

Aside from the children’s branding project, I have also been to an Embossing and Debossing workshop, ink experimentation workshop in LAB week and a Book Making workshop.