Digital Alchemy

I began by looking at other digital artists and their take on what the future holds. I especially like the work of Patricia Piccinini and Chi Peng. Piccinini focuses on the melding of machinery/technology and nature/humans, while Chi Peng concentrates more on ancient culture and how modern life and technology changes it.






I started looking at photographs from our family trip to New Zealand for inspiration. I chose a large sweeping landscape to start with and put water over the sky, implying that the future earth will be under water. I liked the indicial idea but could not see how I could evolve it without seeming clichéd with spaceships or extra planets in the sky.


I then looked at the idea of placing machinery inside a tree. I used an original picture of a tree from New Zealand and placed cogs in its branches to suggest a mechanical element to its functioning. In order to make all the cogs fit together I erased every second cog in some places to make their function seen more plausible.


I also made the cog layers “screen” so it is possible to simultaneously see the cogs and tree, implying that the machinery is inside the tree. On top of that I also reduced the transparency of cogs that were further away from the viewer.

Packaging

For this assignment I began by going to Coles choosing a selection of confectionary wrappers to be redesigned such as Fry’s Turkish Delight, Wrigley’s PK chewing gum, Cadbury Whip etc. I decided to choose PK because its design was so simple, it would be easier to redesign without thinking about the actual packaging.

I began researching other existing chewing gum packages mainly to look at colour and the themes of the design. I do not understand why horses are part of the packaging in multiple chewing gum brands! I also went back to Coles to look at designs on boxes, rather than packets that sweets normally come in.

I began my design for the PK box with the template, as a 5 pack, which is available in Coles, will allow me to put all the necessary information on it that is not present on the individual wrappers. I began looking at stretching & repeating the logo, but this was not very successful. I then decided to look at using brightly coloured bubbles instead. I chose pale, bubble gum colours to accentuate the product but without making it too cheesy.

I then used the same colours to create the PK logo and added larger circles behind the original bubble pattern to add depth. I also began looking at the list of components that should be present in the packaging such as the repeated logo, net weight etc and crossing them off as I put them on.

The most time consuming part was retyping/redrawing all the nutritional information, barcode etc because scanning the information would not have produced results of the same quality. After a colour printing trial i decided to make the colours brighter, because they were too pale and weak when they were printed. I also had major problems with the image wrapping with the circles. This took a couple of days of tweaking to get right.