Welcome to rachelsays... The blog of Rachel Lewis, containing my thoughts and musings on illustration, design, fashion, music, cakey-bakey goodness, culture and things that I generally find cool. There's also a good chance my own illustration work will pop up on here.
All work on this blog is copyright to me unless I state that it isn't. Obviously. Don't do stealing, kids.
So come on in, have a look around, and leave a comment if you like what you see.
On saturday I took the train back up to ye olde Midlands (as is customary for me) for a friend's birthday. It was at The Mailbox in Birmingham, which for those who have never been, is very nice. High end shops, with restaurants and bars. You are led there from New Street by abstract lines in the floor:
Which join from sporadically-placed lamposts. Honestly. It's pretty weird, but nice, you definititely don't get lost!
It's also very pretty, especially later on in the dark; this is the walkway up to The Mailbox. Pretty.
So when I came across the Harvey Nichols window, I loved it. They've got the safari theme going on, but to the extreme! I can't even begin to think about high their budget is; they look like bespoke mannequins to me. Behold:
Hundreds of small wooden blocks that make up the lunging panther-type thing. She doesn't look very worried.
The eye is made from coins! I think they're real. Nice touch. That crocodile is just breathtaking, a futuristic space-age safari.
I love the mannequin's silver hair and skin, and amazing eye makeup. The faces look so real.
They're just nonchalently hanging out with zebras, letting them eat strange paper rags, you know. As you do.
That elephant was insane. So huge, really nice. Strange cling-film-esque set up but it was kind of nice. A subtle nod to captivity? Perhaps.
I'm really excited about this year's YCN Student Awards Briefs. There are so many good ones! It took me a while to to decide which one to do... I almost thought of doing 2 but didn't want to make life stupidly hard for myself. Here are the ones which I found most interesting:
ActionAid I thought would be a good one, because I've done work for their Bollocks to Poverty campaign before and so have a good grasp of it.
Fedrigoni would be a really interesting one because you could do all sorts with paper; I would have gone down the origami/paper art route, creating a viral/ad something made entireley out of folded paper. Something.
Feel Good Drinks are a great little brand, not unlike in feel to Innocent, although much smaller. A good brief that I feel I could execute well, print ads, that sort of thing, and I almost chose it. Almost.
Ted Baker leapt out at me because the brief is to design a new store window design for this year's A/W collection, utilising digital media, not traditional advertising. So this was a bit of a winner for me - I can use my design/illustration/fashion knowledge to create a beautiful/crazy window display, and then use my brilliant marketing skills (lols) to dream up crazy digital media uses to get the word out there. Augmeted reality anyone? Oh yes. Rachel will have fun with this.
The 02 sounded like a good, solid, easy brief. Create a few illustrations. Could have done that. But it felt too easy... not challenging, not pushing me in new directions.
The general idea is to 'devise a campaign for the launch of the Ted Baker Autumn/Winter collections, that makes use of our store windows as its primary vehicle, and utilise other media – digital, ambient, etc – to bring the idea to life, but not traditional press or TV advertising.'
Immediately my mind ran away with me; live fashion shows in store, live mannequins, parties/events, interactive twitter feeds, give aways in store that gave you links to download stuff, possibilities are endless really. I love the idea of augmented reality in windows, this is something that's just starting to appear but Hugo Boss have done it brilliantly:
If you can't be arsed to watch the video all the way through (you should though), the idea is that you are given a card in the store, when you hold the card up to the screen, it does all kinds of magical things and opens up and gives you your own catwalk fahsion show. Spesh. You then take smae card into store, put it against a different camera window, it then plays blackjack and you might win a £50 real voucher to spend in store. It's the perfect way of getting people curious, excited, then get them into store, give them a gift/giveaway (£50!) and they then spend spend spend. Done.
Other examples of this kind of video technology and augmented reality without the use of iphones as a platform are:
Some hockey mask brand using it so you can see what the hockey mask looks like when it's on:
This kind of thing has infinite possibilities in the fashion world. I'm thinking, virtual changing rooms, oh I like that top but can't be bothered to wait in the queue, step in front of the camera, yeah that's a good look. Hmmmm :)
Lego using this to brilliant effect in store:
This is great from Lego's perspective because the buyer can see what the model looks like once it's been made; not always easy to tell from the picture on the box. Kids love this, I bet. I'm jealous of the kids of today. In my day, we had Playdays. On VHS.
The reason why I'm interested in this sort of technology without the use of iphones etc is because it's easier to implement in a shop window, rather than relying on people actually owning iphones, they just step up to it with the trigger which is a card given away/product box/clothing etc. There's lots of 'Real life' AR apps out there - Foursquare, TwittARound, that rely on location and what other people are posting. Not sure if that kind of thing would work here.
Themes: So I'm set for various ideas of how to market/implement the shop window and it's interactiveness, but before this becomes more concrete, I really need to nail the theme of the window. The brief says 'Just think about how many store windows have leaves in them come September/October. We need something distinctly more interesting than this. We could even ignore the fact it’s Autumn completely. Everyone has a calendar and knows when the season’s change. So perhaps a celebration of new Ted Baker collections is more apt. Or something completely different.' And I agree. Leaves/orange/trees/weather in autumn windows and L&F are everywhere. Themes that I'm playing with at the mo are:
Future Retro Death (as in, the death of summer, which is the reason I hate autumn, and also links with Halloween) Medieval/Victoriana Circus Casino Tea Party (this is my fave so far... obviously... I want cupcakes in there somewhere.)
These are all very initial, just visual themes that I love and fit in well with Ted Baker's humour/sense of british/fun/irreverent feel it's got going on. I'm doing lots of visual research on crazy window displays and images of these themes in general, here is a tiny selection of my random brain:
I have an obsession with Union Jack cushions. No really. Maybe that'll feature.
So these are all my initial thoughts, and I'm feeling really positive about it. I've even bought myself a new sketchbook/notebook for this, so I make sure I keep my thoughts organised. Feels just like being back at uni, this is how I used to approach my uni projects. Good times.
I will update when I find anything interesting and relevant to the project; not sure how much of my idea I'm going to post when I've decided on it - I'm aware this is a competition and don't want my ideas to be used by other people before I've entered myself! Such is the woes of t'internet.
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