As a mentor for me during my undergraduate course, I have been keeping in touch with Nicola Liddiard throughout this course. She has also done this Master's degree so I find it useful to seek her advice and feedback on my progress.
The last time I spoke with Nicola, I hadn't arrived at my major project idea yet. Over the Christmas break I felt more solid in my concept but I hadn't spoken to another creative practitioner about it.
I explained to her that I wanted to create a brand that focussed on selling products which I would design based off my 'Colour Character' concept. I explained the inspiration which led to this idea (being the MBTI personality test as well as the zodiac signs), and she understood the angle I was going for.
However, she had some concerns that this idea might be too basic for this level of education. She was worried about the merchandise route for my designs as putting a logo on a t-shirt is not advanced enough. I reassured her that this was not the route I was looking to go down. I want the designs I come up with to be extremely customised to each colour character. Although there may be some variations of similar designs for each character, I am hoping that I can create a rich variety of products that fit with each different personality type so that when the end user looks into purchasing any products, it will fit their unique personality perfectly. I am not looking to create products that could be purchased by anyone; I want it to feel like the colour character that is assigned to someone perfectly suits them, and the products feels tailored to them.
With this concern addressed, we then discussed other creative ways to enhance my project. Nicola then suggested that I could create a small handbook for each colour character that would explore their personality type in depth. This handbook could be intricately designed to be more than just a standard book, potentially with cutouts and windows to make it more unique.
Below is a range of oracle books for each star sign by Susan Kelly:
This is the sort of concept I am hoping to design for each colour character. My aim is to enhance the colour character descriptions from the foundation that already exists- this being just 4 descriptive words for each, into fully realised personality types. To do this I am going to do more research into the MBTI personality types and see where the similarities exist.
Nicola suggested reading 'Fully Booked' by Katherine Gillieson to explore a more creative approach to designing books. I think the handbooks for each colour character will have to be more like brochures than actual books as I will have to create seven different ones, but I am excited to explore a creative approach to book design.
Nicola also mentioned tarot cards, which is something I am already very interested in. We talked about how small businesses can often have pop up stands at conventions or fayres, so having an interactive visual aid would be interesting. I suggested that I could create seven designs for cards and ask people what they felt most drawn to- and on the back would be a description of the colour character associated with that card.
I mentioned this idea later to my friend who has 3 sets of her own tarot cards and she said this sounded more like an oracle card than a tarot card. Oracle cards are defined as "a set of divinatory cards that are used for personal exploration and ritual" (Brown, 2021). It could be a good idea to link animals to the colour characters, so potentially a butterfly for the purple character, a snake for the green character, a lion for the red character, a bee for the yellow character... I would want the design of each card to fully reflect the overall vibe of each character, so I would try to pull as much focus from the animals as possible to avoid people picking a card purely based off of which animal was their favourite.
Finally, Nicola also suggested a way to enhance my project would be to explore the possibility of designing a dynamic brand as opposed to a regular brand. A dynamic brand is defined as "a brand with more energy that can show change, movement and flexibility" (Winter, 2019). This would mean I would have to create a core logo and then design different variations of it. This could work nicely for my idea as the variations could match each individual colour character.
Example of dynamic brand identity:
Nicola recommended reading 'Dynamic Identities: How to Create a Living Brand' by Irene Van Nes to research this more thoroughly.
References:
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