Demotivated. Demoralised. Destroyed

Even though we have made some changes but we are just stuck in this bad dip. For all our previous projects we have bad weeks too, but it always lasts for about a week while for this project we have been having a few bad weeks in a row. We don't know how to bounce back and we don't have the motivation to. This is probably the most challenging project we've all been apart of.

This week we showed our lecturer what we came up with and the direction we have chosen to go to improve ourselves. It was okay and we were given more ideas to build on it.

The thing is now that we have so many things that we need to change, so many things that we need to try, so many decisions that we have to make. It's just all in our face and we don't know where to start. That's the thing at the moment, we have so much in front of us and we don't know where to start. To have something you've worked on for 5 months and having to rip it apart when it was 6 weeks till it was due dealt a huge blow to our morale. Right now we have no motivation whatsoever to start and we have been procrastinating. Team morale is at an all time low and no one seems to want to do work, at this current stage it's another month till all this is due and we are still very far from where we need to be.

We think the main thing is the fact there is so many things that can be either here or there which means we need to make decisions and we don't know what decision we make is right or wrong. Everything is just up in the air and it's all over the place that we don't know how to put it all together.

On top of this we have no idea how the website is going. Our group member Jeanel hasn't contacted us for over 3 weeks, there is no communication about the website and also no communication if she is coming to class or not and we also haven't seen her in about 2 weeks. Nothing from her side so we don't know what is going on there and if we need to think of another plan for the website.

With a month to go I don't know how we will bounce back from this, as it's been about three weeks have we've been in this bad run. We just hope somehow, something will happen that can put some drive back into ourselves.

New ideas. New beginning?

We went through and started thinking of how we could fix the problem that we are in now. We came up with a few different ideas and the main thing we kept in mind was the have more patterns and elements that we can have as part of our brand so everything didn't look the same and boring.

First thing we did was create a bunch of different patterns that could work. Then we went through what we already had and decided what we could keep that was good enough and what we had to change. In the end we needed to change quite a lot of things, our whole packaging, our menus, some of our stationery and also our advertising campaign. In doing so we also need to update and change the style guide as well, so we have a lot ahead of us. We are in a really bad place, so we need to park hard to get back on track

Where to now?

The first step we took was to print everything we have done so far out and put it all up on a wall. We needed everything right in front of us as a whole set and make all the amendments from there.

The main things we wanted to do was to create more patterns that were still part of our brand look and have more elements. From this we thought about ideas such as stripes, "&", crosses and dots as patterns, or having the "&" as an element on it's own like how we have the lemon.

We made some design decisions as well and changed a few things. We made sure we stuck to our core values of fresh, clean and happy and referred back to that for everything we have designed so far and for the ones that didn't work we made changes. Jaz and Delvin stayed back quite late to get all this done and as much as we could so that we could get back on top of things and have a direction of where to go from here.

Here is what we did,

Here are the list of things we need to do or change

Once the team gets together we will have a breakdown of everything and start again from there. There's lots of work to do but I think we can make it work and make this a better package as a whole. For the packaging specifically we will get help next week to make it as good as it can be.  

Now that we have found a better printer that can print faster we can have more time to get things done. 

REEVALUATING EVERYTHING

We've took our fair share of setbacks throughout this project, some bigger than others. Either we overlooked things, didn't consider some things or totally forgot about some things.

With 6 weeks left till this whole project needs to be finished we were dealt a major blow. Not that what we were doing was bad, but we could do a lot better.

What happened

Today we spoke to one of our lecturers and to keep it short and sweet, what we were doing just didn't really cut. The main problems were that we aren't sticking to our brand personalities that we established at the beginning which were

- Fresh

- Clean

- Happy

So because of that a lot of our design work doesn't reflect the things that we have done earlier such as the stationery set. Another problem was that we weren't exploring enough in our brand, we used the pattern way too much as we would just slap it on everything. We got a little lazy in a way that if we didn't know what to put on something we would just use the pattern. Also the same went for our lemon icon and also our logos. We put that on everything, but do we really need a logo on EVERY thing that we have? Shouldn't the brand speak for itself without constantly having the logo there? As a result of this we were told our brand was very dry and boring, there wasn't any depth and substance to it and everything looked the same. A brand needs to keep a certain look but it can't be the same old thing over and over again. There needs to be things to play with and areas to move in but still within the guidelines of our brand. So basically one of the issues was that we didn't have an alternative pattern so everything we did was with that one lemon pattern. We needed more secondary elements that could all be part of our brand, something that is different but still the same. 

What now?

Now we have to take time and go through our entire brand and make refinements, seriously rethink things and reevaluate everything we have and what we can do to make it better. The main goal is to expand ourselves and give more substance to our brand. 

Coasters & Napkins getting printed!

So we have finally received an email confirming that our designs on the coaster and napkins have been approved for the printers to print and they will be printing them this afternoon which means we will get them in about 2 weeks or less.

For the coasters, it will be square and we will have the lemon on it.
For the napkins we just have our secondary logo on it.

Excited for them to come back!

Things are getting done! + New printer

We are halfway through our second trimester with this project and things are all coming together and we are starting to get things done. This week we have completed our menu and style guide, they are all done and going to be set up for print.

On a side note we have found another printer instead of the one we've been using. Previously we were using FC Productions, but we feel that the are a little bit unreliable and a bit slow with replies. Also they are in the process of moving their office so we are afraid there might be some delays in our printing. It was fortunate that Jaz asked someone from her work and they could do the printing for us and the turnaround is a lot quicker and we feel that they were more reliable. Although the price is a bit more expensive but we feel that security and assurance of our work and the turnaround is our number one priority at the moment. So all our stationery items, menu and style guide is ready to go for our first round of printing. Here is what the menus look like,

Main Menu

Specials Menu (which will be stuck inside the main menu)

Drinks Menu 

They are separate pages since we are using a clipboard.

For the packaging, we still need more time, but we are more relaxed about it because with these new printers they can print all our things within a few hours so we feel we have more time to work and we aren't as rushed as before to try and get our stuff out to print. After our lecturer looked at our packaging, we were told it wasn't part of the L&P package and basically it didn't look like any of the other stuff we have done, because we used too much black and everything was so dark. It kind of veered away from our fresh and bright feel that we have. So at this point with the packaging we know everything works, it's just the design work that needs a bit of tweaking. Since Delvin and Jaz have finished with their menus and style guides one of us will help Dut with it.

The new printers can also print burger wrappers so we will be getting that designed soon as it will be really fast since we will just have our pattern on it.

We also decided to have packaging for our style guide, after talking to our lecturer we thought that having some sort of packaging for our style guide will show more care on our part for the style guide. Like, we aren't just creating a style guide just as is because we have to but we want to show that we care about it and in a way, make it better than it could be and bring it that extra step further. So we are going to create a packaging which is like a little box for the style guide and a drawer like system where the style guide will be pulled out from the box.

Changes

From the feedback that we had, we were told that our loyalty cards don't fit with our brand and the rest of the stationery set which is true after looking at it. It's surprising how we don't see such obvious things ourselves until it's actually pointed out to us. The loyalty card was black and it was really really dark when the rest of the stationery set was just white and yellow. So we changed the loyalty cards and here's what they look like now. This will now be our final loyalty card,  

This new colour decision definitely makes our loyalty card fit in more with the rest of our stationery and our brand. 

Along with changing the loyalty cards we also had to change our whole icon range as they weren't consistent in the sense that some were fill and some were strokes and some were both. Honestly it was very careless design and kind of just doing it quickly to get it over and done with. So now doing it the second time we did it properly. We went online and found free vector icons and took them to create our icons. We made them all strokes so they all looked the same. Here are a few,

They look much better now. There are also the black versions of these icons. 

Advertising campaign

Since the last examples that we showed of our campaign we have changed a few things. First we had to go back to basics and figure out the exact direction we want to go with this campaign. So here is what we have decided,

Campaign type: Teaser > with a follow up campaign
Campaign message: Homestyle food/food from home
What should be achieved: Awareness to our brand/ bring in new customers

So we broke our campaign down to three different parts, for all these parts it will be through posters.

Teaser 1

So the first batch of teaser posters will have a simple question or statement and our website somewhere on the poster with our logo on it. Some questions that we have thought of are,

1)"Your mum won't be happy with us"

2)"Is your mum a bad cook?"

3)"Miss mum's cooking?"

4)"Mum isn't home tonight?"

So people who see this and are intrigued, they can go onto the website. Upon visiting the website, one of our header images on our carousel will be information that leads to the second part of the teaser campaign. 

Teaser 2

This will consist of just one type of poster which will just be of our lemon icon on the poster with our logo and website. The instructions from the website will lead people to find these lemon posters and take a photo with it, there will be some sort of game (exact rules haven't been established) but they will then post their photo on Instagram and hashtag it a hashtag that we decide then the winner will get a free meal for 2. This will encourage people to look for our posters and create some talk and interest in our restaurant.

People who didn't see our Teaser 1 can still hop on to the website to see what all this is about as the website will also be on this poster and they can join in as well.

Follow up campaign

The follow up campaign is after we have had our official opening and there are people who know about us and are talking about us. The follow up will be basically answering the questions from Teaser 1 campaign. It's putting ourselves our there and telling people who we are and what we offer, the fact that we are here and anyone can come dine with us.

Website issues II

So we recently came across another problem with the website. Now that Jeanel is working on trying to customise the website to our brand she has realised it's a lot harder than she first thought. Since the creator of the template has done the coding in their own way, it's hard for Jeanel to try and change it because if she wants to change it she must first understand the language that the original coder has used.

The website might take longer than first expected and that's a worry for us because we want a fully functional website for our final presentation.

The next step the team will take will be to sit down with Jeanel and write a list of all the things we want to be done on the website, the things that Jeanel knows how to do and then create a priority list so we have a "worst case scenario" website and a "best case scenario".

Our shopping trip and name tags!

So last week we made a shopping trip to buy everything that we need. Unfortunately there were many things on our shopping list that we couldn't get. We ended up ticking off just a few things on the list, so we decided that we will get those things online so it's much faster and we wouldn't have to go around and look for it and always we know that the chances of finding it online is much higher that going to stores to find them. So the three things that we will buy online are,

- clipboard for the menus (we found this at officeworks so we will buy this item from officeworks)
- white paper bags
- mini deep fry wired baskets for the fries

On the positive side, we got our name tags! So we designed and printed off our name tags to put in the badges and they look awesome! that's another thing that we can cancel off the list!

Odd Jobs here & there

So we are starting to do a few odd jobs here and there so it seems like everything is coming together.

Mock up Photos

We started to search for pictures online that we could use for our product mock up photography, that way we have the images that we know we will be working with so when we take photos of our products we know what we looking for and what shots to take.

Advertising

We have made a start on the advertising campaign, a little earlier than timed in for but since there's not much that can be done now for the menus we thought we could start on the advertising posters first. A few concepts have been drafted. 

The first idea was to have a "hero" poster as our main one and then 2 or 3 other posters to complete the series. Here are some ideas for the hero poster,

This is one of the teaser posters that will be part of the series, not completed yet, but this is something we are playing with and exploring.

Shopping Trip!

So very soon we will be doing a shopping day where we will be going around to different shops and buying all the things that we need for this project. We have wrote down a shopping list for this which includes the packaging items we will be making ourselves like coffee cups and salad boxes. We will be going to places like Kmart and Spotlight to find other things for our projects like clipboards. We will head down to officeworks to collect the name badges we ordered last week. 

New idea!

Do we even have time for this?

Oh well, we will give it a try anyway. We randomly came up with this idea..

During the process of trying to find out how we can present our drinks menu, we saw this concept. 

At first we were thinking about this for a menu idea, but we weren't 100% sold on it. So while we decided that we would go with the clipboard idea for the drinks menu we were enlightened to another idea that we could use with this concept. It was brought to our attention that we could use this, not for the menu but for a little fun game sort of thing that could attract more customers and also bring back customers that dine with us for the first time.

So the idea was to use the same spinning arrow concept, and on the piece of card or paper, we will have different things, some good some not so good, of things such as "buy one get one free", get a pasta at half price, free meal etc. So the patrons will spin it and see what they get. The exact rules of this game is yet to be established but we will get to it once the designing is under way. But we were thinking a once a week thing, on a certain night we will bring this out in the restaurant and people can spin it. 

Badges!

We have put in an order for our name badges. We bought plastic ones with a pin, which has a slot for us to slip a piece of paper in with our name and maybe a logo of some sort in. We wanted to get customised ones but they were just too expensive to get made.

We did some research and found that we could just get plastic ones and put our own name in it. Also the positive about this is that we can actually use our own typefaces and colours on the badge because if we sent it away it would be with the colours and typefaces that they have to offer so it will be different from the rest of our stuff.

Aprons

For the aprons we kind of put it on the back burner because they are really expensive and we don't see the need to spend so much for something we will only be using once. So because of that we don't see it as a need. As long as we have our badges and polo tee. If towards the end we have time we could buy our own aprons and iron our logo on it. 

Changes to the loyalty card

During the process of getting some of the files ready for print, we started of with the stationery stuff.
While we were getting the loyalty card ready for print we made some changes as we thought it will make it more similar to the business card so it all looks like a complete set. The small change we made was just to round the corners of the loyalty card just like the business card.

Back on track!

Everything seems to back on track over the last week, we got ourselves into gear and put in some good work and everything looks like it will be done on time. We've had a few busy days and with one week till the packaging, style guide and menus are supposed to be done, we should be able to kill it all on time.

Style Guide

The style guide is on a roll at the moment, the layout is all good and the content is basically all there. Now it's just a matter of putting the two together and completing the style guide. We've already sourced some very good images for our style guide, the only thing left for the style guide was the logo and typography specifications. We pretty much cleared that too, the typography specifications are all done and good to go. The logo spacing and specifications are nearly done, so with all that completed the style guide will be done in the next week for sure. It will be about 40 pages long and we will be using thicker stock so it will be really good to hold. Looking forward to seeing it!

Packaging

Packaging is going quite smoothly as well, we have all the designs ready. There are just some minor adjustments and refinements we are making with the actual design of it, like colours and where we put our patterns and where we put images etc. We just printed off a few of the packaging designs on just normal paper and tested out the folding and the whole mechanics of the packaging. All went well, so now we know it works we are just fine tuning the design work of it. Here are some of the things we tried mocking up

Basically this is what it looks like on normal paper, nothing too fancy, we didn't even have glue or anything. .Just to make sure it all works and it did! After fixing the design stuff up, we will be getting it ready for print (setting up files to print)

Menu

The menu is going really well. It's pretty much completed and there's nothing really that we need to do to them, basically ready for print. The only reason we would need to make changes is if feedback from any lecturers meant that we have to make more refinements. But one of the lecturers was happy with what he saw and the whole group is happy with everything. So once we have the all clear we will be getting the files ready for print. 

We've also done some menu signages that will go around the restaurant. We will not be doing life size, we will just be doing mock ups and printing them out on paper to show what it would hypothetically look like. Here's the two that we've done,

The first one will sit behind the counter and act as a takeaway menu. So when customers come up to the counter they can read the menu and order to go from there. The second one will be on a wall in our restaurant since the information on it will be aimed more at people who will be eating in. It will have the specials for the day which aren't on the menu and also the staff picks from the menu. 

For the drinks menu, we have settled to just present it on a mini clipboard. We scoured the internet for innovative ideas and also our own brains but we just couldn't think of anything so we will go with the clipboard which is the trend now and it's what we think people will like.

Website

The website is going well, it is still being built and Jeanel has seeked help with some of the stuff that she doesn't know. It should be finished ahead of schedule, probably around week 8 or 9.