Product shots using a martini glass borrowed from Jane Denton and filled with water and yellow food colouring.

So I finally got the stickers printed downstairs in the digital dungeon and sourcing the bottle shape was a fairly long winded process. I was looking mainly in alcohol bottles and was coming up empty handed, but on a fateful trip to Morrisons for pasta and other student fodder, I caught sight of a bottle of oil. It's Morrisons' 'the best' Spanish extra virgin olive oil, and as well as being the tall, thin bottle that I was looking for, the liquid inside was also the colour that I wanted it to be, so I didn't even have to crack the seal of the bottle or anything. Score. Also, very cheap to buy, which suited me just fine.

Anyway, the liquid inside was yellow and transparent, which was great because the stripes on the sticker on the back showed strongly through the liquid to create an illusion within the bottle while the front sticker could be kept very basic.

Also, borrowing a Martini glass from one of the tutors and using a mix of water and yellow food colouring, I managed to get some excellent product shots of the bottle and of the glass together. The pictures turned out really well, in fact and I think my skills at product shots are getting better.

Using my ever so perfect for this project bottle of olive oil, I decided that before I print my stickers for the back, I should check that the actual idea of putting the stripes on the back of the bottle will work before I go about doing it. This is a really rough way of checking it because I literally drew the stripes onto a notepad and held them behind the bottle. Very crude.



Obviously, the liquid in the bottle makes the image seem warped and stretched so that is something to take into account.



The liquid makes the diagonal lines seem quite horizontal, curing at the edges and making a sort of ~ shape.




While they do make the stripes seem quite horizontal, I still think that the yellow and black stripes get the point across pretty much and the stripes will become more diagonal the emptier the bottle becomes, so the design works both with a full bottle and an empty one.

The good thing about using olive oil is that the liquid in the bottle is already the right colour and I don't have to crack the seal on the lid or anything. If I did, I would have to photoshop the break out.

And on billboards. The Illustrator files below weren't quite wide enough so when I applied them to the billboards, they stretched a little bit which is something that I need to address and will get onto pronto.

Stretching aside, they make very high impact billboards.

On bus stops.

These are the two images that I have chosen to be my promotional material for this night at the cinema. For the Harry Potter one I was only using one image but for this, I could not decide between the two and I believe that they work quite well as a set and put a bit of variety into the mix. I used the logo and an iconic quote on each and the way they are, I really don't think that they need to say what the actual movie is. They say it on their own and definitely appeal to the target audience.

Promotional material for the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy night at the cinema. There is a day of the year dubbed to be 'Towel Day' to celebrate the books and the movie so that is the day when the movie night would take place. The HHGTTG logo is fairly iconic amongst the fandom so the planet with the thumbs up inside it was my first port of call. I love this logo, it works while being entertaining at the same time. Anyway, because this movie night's target audience would be people who are already fans of the books and the film, so the logo is instantly going to be recognisable to them. I thought about using the logo and the most iconic quotes from the books and not explaining them, just letting them speak for themselves like a campaign.

I used the logo and quotes such as 'Don't Panic', 'Have you got your towel?' and 'Life? Don't talk to me about life.' Fans of the series are going to know exactly what the quotes are about.


While I've been playing mostly with black and white, with the blue Odeon logo, I pulled a stock image of space off Google to play around with, laying things on top of it and cutting shapes out of it to see what I could make. I actually much prefer the space image as the logo or behind it, even as part of the text because it makes it so much more interesting than simply black and white and it also relates perfectly to the subject matter.

Going back to the Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster, when it came to making the labels for the conical shaped bottle that I had, I came to the realization that I just didn't like it. The design isn't sitting well with me and I've gone back to the tall, thin bottle that I was designing originally. This time around, I much prefer it and it sits much better with me. I have gone back to the idea of the design going across both the front and the back label of the bottle, the hazard stripes going on the back of the bottle and showing through the liquid rather than having the front label of the bottle being so busy.

Another thing that has changed is the logo. I was struck by inspiration while watching the film, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. When I had changed the point size of each word so that they filled the same width before wasn't working at all, but I got to playing around with the warp and free transform tool in Illustrator, and warped the words to be pulled up and down to different levels. I really like this new logo and the way it warps and sits together has far more of a 'sci fi' and futuristic feel to it than it ever has before.

Continuing for a short while on the idea of adverts and customer feedback, the above is just a version of the one in the previous post that doesn't have the hazard warning stripes along the top and the bottom. These aren't very good, I know that much, I'm just taking a brief break to go in another direction before my head explodes.

I also had another play with using the 'brain smashing out' thing as a descriptor. Like most adverts will be all, our product is amazing, we're so wonderful you have to have us, etc etc. I'm using the phrase as almost a tag line, a selling point.

 Not sure it's working but hey, gotta try before you know.

I am not enjoying this new style of blogger posting in truth. It's vexing me somewhat rotten. I'm still not entirely sure what the context of this project is so I'm running with it and seeing where it takes me. In order to get away from bottle design for just a short while, I thought I'd have a bit of a laugh doing some customer testimonials or adverts for the product that would probably appear in magazines and the like.