Aspirations as a Visual Communication Designer
Project Overview
Project Brief
The Brand :
Welkin Publishing
Book Title Ideas :
Navigate Your Emotions
It's Okay To Be Different
Miscellaneous Facades
Goals :
- To get people inspired and touched by immersive visuals of an author's book teaser.
- Book teasers aim to bring out the person's inner world in a meaningful way and guide them through a metamorphosis.
Deliverables :
- Billboard 3D Animation
- Augmented Reality through QR code in art gallery / public spaces
- Static 3D render images for a book cover mock-up
- Logo branding for this project
Target Audience:
Age - 18 to 40 years old
Gender - Unisex
Culture - Book workshops, Book clubs
Location: Australia and Global
Socioeconomic Level - Low to high
Interests / Beliefs / Values - Book enthusiasts, Personal Identity, Technology trends
Expectations :
3-dimensional, minimalistic, contemporary
Constraints :
Rendering programs such as blender consumes a lot of graphics processing unit (GPU), if you do not have a good PC. Rendering time will take longer than expected.
Primary Research
Guerrilla Marketing
A popular concept often associated with low-budget, early stage companies.
Why is Guerrilla marketing considered as a low-budget marketing strategy? That is because unlike traditional marketing where investing money is a requirement to sell out the product, whilst guerrilla allows businesses to be creative. Investing in time, energy, imagination, and information instead.
Traditional marketers, at the end of the month, count money. Guerrillas count new relationships.
Secondary Research
Understanding the book industry prior to delivering campaigns for authors, plays a crucial part in visual communication. Particularly Consumer Sentiment Index, signifying how consumers feel about their financial status when purchasing books. Followed by it's revenue and how often they are on the internet searching for books. Along with the growth between online and physical bookstores. According to Fig 1, there is an rise in online bookstore services where consumers likely to purchase books online than in-store. Based on these statistics, it is convincing for authors to sell their books post "Guerrilla Marketing" strategy. As mentioned in the primary research, this plan of action will likely attract genuine consumers organically and is budget friendly. Source: IBIS World
Style Research
Images Source: Jeremy Noble 1 , Jeremy Noble 2 , Lado Benashvili , Nguyen Nhut , Roman Klčo , Jeremiah Shaw
3D animated billboards based in the context of books
3D animated billboard other than books
Concept Ideation
Design Experimentations
Experiment 1 - Logo Design/Branding
Brand Introduction
Experiment 2 - Blender Software
Since Blender is my first 3D rendering software, my first attempt I went for a tutorial on modelling an already made preset tree from blender. Proceeding to alter changes within the node editor to my liking in order to form a tree different from the preset. This is a practice run before modelling a tree from scratch for my final project.
Tutorials Followed :
Final Results
Experiment 3 - Presentation Formats
Augmented Reality
Art Gallery Animation Rough Mock-up
Image Source : Mike Von
Milestone Reflection
Books have always been my number one source of knowledge, particularly life-guide / psychological books. I've always wanted to see if I could create those immersive 3D animation I see on the internet where it feels like the characters in the animation is coming to life. Therefore, this idea of bringing the author's book to life is what I think will break the norm of traditional marketing of books. Even though I knew what I was getting into, I definitely did not consider the time and efficiency of the computer.
There was undoubtedly the constraints when creating the 3D renders of the trees. Therefore, the animation is at a shorter time span (8 seconds). Rendering each frame took about an hour to one and a half hours with own computer at home. The recommended set number of frames is at 250 in order to have a longer free flow animation, however this is not the case with mine. With the number of hours spent waiting for each frame to render, the same long hours was being used to learn a new software (Blender). While I see others who is able to learn Blender within a short amount of time, my skills in 3D is one of those very beginner level. Blender has a huge amount of keys and settings to learn and after all the outcomes of my renders is very minimal and basic; implementing Blender Add-Ons. There was also a huge time constraint in creating more quality mock-ups of the final design since I spent the rest of my time on learning how to 3D render.
For my final assessment of this unit, I will challenge myself to customise 3D trees from scratch, possibly add in environmental elements such as rocks, water, flowers, etc. I will most definitely be expanding my technical knowledge other than Blender, with softwares like Cinema 4D and Spline. Additionally, attempt to use campus computers (which I did not get the time to go to one) to see if renders can be sped up or invest in a better PC setup for home. If in any case I'm not able to get the desired 3D design outcome, I will stick with creating more logo variations, branding, and book cover design.
Bibliography
Levinson, J., Levinson, J., & Levinson, A. (2007). Books on Google Play Guerrilla Marketing, 4th Edition: Easy and Inexpensive Strategies for Making Big Profits from Your Small Business (4th ed., pp. 5-8).
Dunung, S. (2010). Growing Your Business (1st ed., p. 25).