Establishing A Concept

Stormy Storm

New Member
Hey everyone.

I'm currently studying HNC visual communication, and we've recently been given a project to design a label for a craft beer company.

We were asked to come up with 3 Concepts and present them to our tutor. Everyone has done the same thing and our tutor has told us that we have just been looking at styles and ideas. However, no one can understand what she wants us to do, and I can't find anything helpful on the internet about coming up with a concept!

Its driving me mad because I only have 2 weeks left to finish the entire thing and I don't even know what a concept is at the moment.

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

Thanks
 
Have you tried asking the tutor?

Seriously - it's for a craft beer. There's a billion concepts out there already.


Firstly - establish your competition, take shots of craft beers that you like - sample them at your peril, or simply enjoy them ...

Anyway - once you get a label concept from the selection of competition craft beers then start working on your mood board.

Is it going to be a light colour, dark colour, what colours do you like, what goes well, 1 colour, 2 colour 10 colours - foils, embossing, etc.


From your competitions ideas on how they branded, start developing your own concept.

What's the name of the company - how is it different to other beers, is Wheat, is it Gluten Free, is it made from barnicles, is it made in pot, brewed, stewed, boiled, steamed etc.

Play around with different name concepts. etc.


I think you have enough to work on.
 
Obviously the first thing to do would be to talk to your tutor.... sounds like she's confusing the students which isn't exactly a good thing. She might even be a bit confused herself from what you're saying here....

I don't know what the brief is exactly so I'm going on what you're saying here.

A concept can be interpreted in more than one way which isn't exactly helpful lol.
You have a 'concept' that is laying down the ground work for future ideas, think of it as the foundation of a house before you build the house on top it. I personally class this more as idea generation or brainstorming than concepts but I do come from a slightly different field (product design but have done graphic courses too).
Then you have the concepts which you would show to the client, personally I refer to these as initial concepts, and then develop further into the final design.
Some people refer to the final design as the final concept before it gets signed off.
 
Thanks Hank!
Yeah we did, but it didn't help us understand it any more.

The beer and company already has a name.

Its the concept part i'm really stuck on. Like, whats a concept for a craft beer called Jinny Greenteeth thats based in Cumbria?

So I look at history, tradition, folklore.

But my tutor tells me these are all styles and not concepts.

Completly lost
 
The beer and company already has a name.

Its the concept part i'm really stuck on. Like, whats a concept for a craft beer called Jinny Greenteeth thats based in Cumbria?

So I look at history, tradition, folklore.
That's likely because that wouldn't be the 'concepts' she's looking for, the 'history, tradition and folklore' would be used in the initial ideas/brainstorming stage I referred to where you develop your direction to develop ideas from. I wouldn't personally class them as styles either, that's a different stage in the development so I can kind of understand why you're all getting confused.

What it sounds like your tutor is expecting is for you to come up with 3 visual concepts with different ideas that you can 'show to the client' at that first meeting. So you need to start doing sketches and ideas and maybe some 'rough' presentations of 3 of those sketches. In other words the bit I class as initial ideas.
 
That's likely because that wouldn't be the 'concepts' she's looking for, the 'history, tradition and folklore' would be used in the initial ideas/brainstorming stage I referred to where you develop your direction to develop ideas from. I wouldn't personally class them as styles either, that's a different stage in the development so I can kind of understand why you're all getting confused.

What it sounds like your tutor is expecting is for you to come up with 3 visual concepts with different ideas that you can 'show to the client' at that first meeting. So you need to start doing sketches and ideas and maybe some 'rough' presentations of 3 of those sketches. In other words the bit I class as initial ideas.

Thanks Levi, Thats really helpful. That solves part of the problem for me, which was how to present them.

Yeah we're all completely lost. So is a concept like the final thing then? Like what you think it will look like? Or have I just missed the point again haha.
 
Ok this is pretty my approach to any brief but they can have slight variations due to the type of work being done but it should help guide you if nothing else :)

  • get brief from client after taking notes etc
  • break down and analyse the brief so you don't do more than you need to. At the end of the day you only have a limited amount of time (and money being paid) for the job so we should use it wisely.
  • Use the analysis to head into your initial ideas stage, brainstorming from things like company history, tradition, folklore etc etc and things talked about in the meeting
  • Develop visual ideas (note always keep pen and paper handy as these can happen at any stage, even in a meeting), quick ideas you don't normally show to the client
  • Analyse/breakdown the initial sketches
  • Develop some more initial ideas
  • Refine the '3' different concept designs you want to present to the client for feedback and do a high quality sketch/computer based image for client to view - doesn't need to be completely refined, this is after all the initial ideas stage.
  • Present the ideas to the client, now this does vary depending on project/designer but clean and simple layouts never go out of fashion in my opinion and is easy for the client to view. Think about how it's going to be displayed, print will be different to a powerpoint presentation for example.
  • Get client feedback and if lucky a preferred design selected.
  • Break down and analyse the feedback
  • Develop idea some more based on feedback
  • Repeat above 4 steps until client is happy (you may want to define how many revisions they would get in the quote)
  • Get the design the client is happy with signed off as final design
  • Final presentation with all the required info the client would need to use finalised design.
Now there are often times when this will adjust slightly due to client changing their minds or changes in requirements but the process is pretty similar in most areas of design.
 
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