GCSE Media Studies: JelGel: a New Product for a Fourteen to Sixteen Year Old

Post length: 885 words, almost 4 minutes.

This project is a little different to the essays I have published previously. As part of the coursework relating to the (additional, extra curricular) GCSE media studies course I studied, my friend and I designed a new product line aimed at fourteen to sixteen year olds. The aim of the coursework were to design the packaging and an advert for the product. Sadly I don’t have the finished product any more, but I do have both our planning document and the final evaluation. As always, this is released under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial 2.0 UK: England & Wales Licence.

At this point I’d like to tip my hat to both Julie Patrick (look, she has co-authored a book about studying film) and Triestina Bozzo (now head of the Creative/Media Arts Faculty), both excellent drama and media teachers at Ryburn Valley High School. I’d also like to point out that when I attended the school it was not a specialist “Media Arts” school — these things didn’t exist — and that myself and a friend were the first people at the school to do video production as part of our expressive arts coursework. I’ll try to publish that one day. We were, one could argue, pioneers.

Design a new product for a fourteen to sixteen year old

Planning and design document — Covering product brain storming, packaging colour and design thoughts, design outline, advert brain storming and some decision making.

Evaluation

The final advert is a success! We are pleased with the design and format of the finished product and believe that it does fulfil the brief set. We believe that the advert would appeal to the teenage girl audience.

Research consisted of looking at, particularly, adverts featured in magazines of the target audience, in this case teenage girls, and at hair products. We decided to split the research into these two different areas and research them separately as individuals, then to come back and discuss our findings with the other. Interestingly a number of hair products were in teen magazines already, and this made the job a little easier. The intention of the research was to gather ideas on how products are sold to a teenage audience – what type of advertising, colours and text, and also how hair products were sold generally, looking for the same information. We found many similarities in the two areas of advertising, in terms of design and methods of presentation. We used some of the ideas we researched into in our final product.

We needed to come up with a product identity to begin to get an idea of how to sell the product, so we decided to look into bottle designs and decide on one for our product. We looked at many designs and sketched a few to see how they would look in terms of advertising on paper. We chose to use a less standard design as that helped the product have a more unique feel. Next we wanted to design a logo – something the user will relate to on the shelf. This would also help to define a product image. We wanted to make it colourful so at this point we had to decide on a colour scheme.

We had a brainstorming session on colour and come up with many colour schemes. From this we chose one, the one we thought would, based on our research, appeal to the audience the best. We chose neon. So we brainstormed that too, to develop some colours we could use, of this we chose the two that we thought, on merit, would both appeal most and work best on the printed page.

Following this we came up with a number of different ideas for the final product. We decided to come up with an idea each so that we finally had a total of four, and then we looked at the ideas to chooses one which one would most appeal to the target audience and which one would best advertise the product. We chose one idea for a basic layout, but also used some elements of the other designs to help build up the final design. Then it was a case of pulling the whole product idea from a small sketch to a larger size full A4 page one and developing the finer points of it.

This full-page sketch then would need to be transformed into a design on computer if the design was to be used in a teenage magazine. However, due to restrictions in technology this was not possible for us to do. If it was, then the colours would be heavier and so would contrast more and, hopefully, attract the eye more than the pencil coloured one. The use of an art package to create the pictures used and a desktop publisher to put together the design would be the best solution, providing a clean, professional look to the advert and allowing it to be used as a full-page design in a magazine.

We believe that the final design compares favourably to existing advertisements on the market at the moment in terms of appeal to the chosen target group. We believe that the colour used and the simplistic design would be of interest to the target group and would be affective in publicising the product.

Posted on Wednesday 12th September, 2012 at 2:30 pm in School Work.
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