Hallmark (comp)- Development.

Development of the visuals was very easy and had to be quick because of the little time which I had left to finish before submission among other work for various other briefs at the moment.
I began by taking the sketches I had draw and making them into vectors using the live trace option. I was initially going to draw over with the pen tool but found that live trace left the hand drawn appearance which I wanted to show. This was also a quicker process which is always good and allowed me to experiment with the colours and layout of the pattern more.

I chose to remove the cherry illustration as I noticed that this appear the odd one out because although the object is featured in the ingredients of many sweet treats and cakes it was not the star. It did not make my sweet treat concept very clear when represented by itself in a pattern. 

Colour palettes were something which Hallmark had set as part of the brief. Although they had given a great deal of choice at times this was difficult to get to compliment each other in the way I had to apply them within this design. I found that often the colours were bright and engaging as wanted but the palette didn't offer a muted tone to use as a background so the elements could stand out. 

I wanted the illustrations to have a hand rendered appearance throughout so I continued this visual idea in how the block shading and colour was added. I easily achieved this with a Wacom tablet and it gave it a hand sketched appearance that still matched the vector outlines and suggested the involvement of a child in its making. I continued to do this across all the illustrations and once I was happy moved on to the layout of the pattern using these. 

I referred back to the brief guidelines to see how many patterns I could submit as I felt that with the illustrations I had developed they would work better individually rather than trying to cram all onto one artwork. It would then look too busy and cluttered and I wanted them to stand out but still be simple and not too hard to understand. A smaller repeat pattern would also allow the design to be easier to adapt to a variety of formats and size without loosing any detail or character drawings.

I experimented with a few more colour options until I was finally happy with the design. I found one which offered a dark colour as well as a variety of bright shades. This would allow me to create the distinguished areas of focus and detail as wanted but still allow the line detail to stand out and be of highest importance in the visual. The dark navy colour improved this legibility massively. 

I also realised that on a lot of card designs a single illustration used alongside type is displayed on the card. This was a chance to introduce a title for the collection and a different sort of visual other than pattern. I struggled with the placement of the text because there was so much detail going on so to improve the titles legibility I added a drop shadow around. Although this made legibility good and the type stand out without losing any detail from the illustration I was still not happy with the final outcome something just didn't feel right. I don't know if this is because it is so different to the other artworks I had produced or if it was because it was the only one using typography. 

I finally worked on developing a final range of solutions to the brief which I could submit. Once I have added all the colours I will then decide which are the strongest ready to submit.