This project was a brief set by the Graphic Design studio Stocks Taylor Benson who are based in Leicester, London and now Leeds. The brief was to create a brand of garden bird seed and then design the packaging for the product itself.
I decided to aim my product at children, therefore I wanted it to be playful and interactive. I came up with the character of Mrs Finch who would be almost like a 'grandma' and a teacher all rolled into one! She would show the children how to mix the perfect blend of bird seed with lard and then encourage them to host a dinner party for all the birds in their garden. I started by sketching some birds in different styles, ranging from detailed to more minimal designs and I preferred the look of the more childlike and simplistic ones. I decided that the rounded designs suited the brand I wanted to create and I narrowed it down to the bottom two sketches on the image below.
Next, I began to experiment with the two different logo designs changing the colours to represent different birds but ultimately I knew I wanted to stick with the Mrs Finch character so the navy and pink colour scheme represented that best. I just needed to decide whether I wanted to go with the chef's hat and follow a bakery theme for the brand, or go with the bird wearing an apron which could be adapted into either a dinner party or bakery theme further down the line depending on what the focus needed to be.
The grey background wasn't working for me, especially with the chef's hat logo because the brand could easily be mistaken for bakery products rather than bird seed. I would have the same issue even with the apron logo so the colour scheme needed some thought. To steer away from the bakery theme and also attract the attention of children I wanted the background to be bright and cheerful, something that would stand out on the shelf. With Mrs Finch being navy, I decided that yellow complimented her really well!
I also developed a typeface that would be used as the name of the brand and as additional text on the packaging. Again, I wanted something playful so included the little bird's footprint as a dot for each letter 'I'. This makes the brand more recognisable without making drastic changes to the type itself and still allowing the customer to read it easily. I used this typeface for the words 'treat the birds in your garden' as I knew I needed to explain the story behind the brand and actually show the customer what the product is. The main issue I had with the branding for this project is that it looked too much like bakery products and I needed to make it clear that this was bird seed whilst still using the bakery theme..! This is when I started drawing out little illustrations that would be used on a recipe card in the hope that I could show the process visually and that the customer would understand what the product actually was.
I chose my final colour palette and drew out the illustrations I would need for the recipe and began arranging them on the front and back of the packaging. With the logo being round I thought she sat quite well in the middle right where the hole would be if this was an actual bird's house! Although I like the simplistic style of the illustrations, they could be developed further with more depth and shading rather than just outlines but overall I think they work well with the brand identity being childlike and minimal.
This was the part I enjoyed the most, Mrs Finch's Guest List! Originally my idea was to draw out some of the birds that would typically be seen in an English garden and create a checklist for children to tick off once they had seen them. Hopefully encouraging the children to put the food out for the birds in the first place! This then turned into a guest list to fit in with the dinner party theme I had originally thought of. I played around with bow ties and top hats just to emphasise the theme a little more but if I were to develop the idea I could create lots of little characters with these birds, build families with them and even have a children's story book that fits in with the brand.
Carrying on with the idea of pushing the Mrs Finch brand further, I drew out a few designs for other products that could be sold as special edition items all in line with the Mrs Finch branding. I stuck to kitchen utensils and cooking related products that children could collect and use and perhaps there could be a recipe book to follow, so that Mrs Finch could teach them how to cook for people too!
