TMC UNIT 9 & 10
The Brief
OVERVIEW
To develop a comprehensive brand inventory for a fictional time travel company called Time Travel Tours (TTT), which caters to high-paying clients seeking unique, enriching experiences that broaden their understanding of history and human civilization. The goal is to outline the purpose, product/service, target audience, process/methodology, brand persona, and brand promise for TTT, as well as suggestions on how customers should feel during their experience with the company.
KEY POINTS
Creative Challenge
Create a brand identity for Time Travel Tours.
Target Audience
TTT’s clientele is targeted towards high earning people with a love for history.
Deliverables
A logo, colour palette, 1 event in history to present as a holiday destination, promotional material.
Considerations
Consider the demographic and how to present the brand effectively.
RESEARCH
BRAND INVENTORY
WHO?
- Wealthy individuals seeking exclusive experiences and increased knowledge about history.
- History enthusiasts who want firsthand accounts of historical events.
WHAT?
- Time Travel Tours offers one-of-a-kind tours that take clients on journeys through time, allowing them to witness key events in history firsthand.
- Time Travel Tours provides a safe, secure, and luxurious environment for clients, ensuring their comfort during their tour.
- Time Travel Tours guarantees a non-interference policy, ensuring the integrity of historical events remains intact.
WHY?
- Offering clients a way to travel back in time to witness events and locations with a only 1 exception that time cannot be altered.
- Provide clients that are willing to pay the high price to experience history first hand and gain a better understanding of past events.
HOW?
- Excitement: A sense of anticipation and curiosity about the unique experiences that await you during your time travel journey with Time Travel Tours.
- Safe: Knowing that your safety, comfort, and overall experience are our top priorities.
- Respect for the Past: Witnessing historical events without altering them, providing a deeper appreciation for the past and its impact on the present-day society.
- Luxury: Enjoying a luxurious environment designed to cater to your needs and preferences throughout your time travel journey.
- Satisfaction: Knowing that you have chosen an exclusive experience that sets you apart from the ordinary, creating lasting memories and stories to share with others.
TONE
- The brand will sound friendly whilst still being professional.
Audience profile
Demographics
- Age: 25 – 60
- Gender: Any
- Ethnicity: Any
- Income: +£80,000
Socio-Economic Status
- ACORN Type: A (Affluent Suburbs) or C1W (Upper Middle Class Professional), B (Wealthy Suburbs) or G (Super-rich City Dwellers) to attract CEOs and other high net worth individuals
- Education: Bachelor’s degree and above
- Employment: Highly skilled professionals, entrepreneurs, executives, or business owners
- Occupation: Historians, scientists, engineers, lawyers, doctors, bankers, and other high-income professions
- NRS Classification: ABC1 (higher and intermediate managerial, administrative, and professional occupations)
Psychographics
- Values: Exclusivity, luxury, knowledge, history, personal growth, intellectual curiosity, and adventure
- Attitudes: Forward-thinking, open-minded, risk-tolerant, discerning, and high-achieving
- Lifestyle: Affluent, cultured, socially engaged, globally-minded, and active
- Interests: Travel, history, technology, finance, art, culture, luxury goods, and sports
- 4C’s (Consumer Characteristics): Customization, Convenience, Connection, Curiosity, Control
Geo-demographics
- Time Travel Tours’ primary target audience resides in urban areas with a high concentration of high-income earners. This includes major cities such as London, New York, Paris, Tokyo, Hong Kong, and San Francisco, among others. However, the company is open to catering to affluent travellers from other locations who share the same values and interests.
Audience Personas
Cleor Badu
Age: 49
Location: Berlin
Occupation: CEO at a tech firm
Property: 4 Bed Villa
Background: Cleor runs a tech firm she started 20 years ago, and lives with her husband and 2 kids in the outskirts of Berlin, Germany
Gerald Tabel
Age: 34
Location: Prague
Occupation: Board member a of suit company
Property: 5 Bed Penthouse
Background: Gerald helps run a family owned company, has no kids, and a girlfriend.
Example Destination Presentation
Contextual Research
Colour Theory
The colours used are clean and distinguishable, making the brand pop whilst still keeping a high-end feeling. The use of 4 colours has allowed me to use them to highlight certain elements and has given me the freedom to expand the designs if needed.
YInMn Blue
Mood Assosiated
- calmness
- stability
- trust
Light Cyan
Mood Assosiated
- freshness
- purity
- innocence
Burnt Sienna
Mood Assosiated
- warmth
- energy
- passion
Gunmetal
Mood Assosiated
- mystery
- sophistication
- elegance
Semiotics
Semiotics used throughout this project has mainly consisted of clock faces with hands blurred anticlockwise to give the impression that tme is going back. Based on feedback, this decision has proved successful and well implemented, with the majority stating that the idea is “unique” and “thought out of the box”.
PLANNING
Holiday Planning
Here, I began planning out holiday ideas, with the first one being to vitis Billie Holiday in NYC, only issue being there wasnt really 1 week worth of events during her performance apart from her, and because I wanted to make a long holiday with alot more to experience, I came up with 2 huge events to visit, the first being the start of Hitlers attempt to take over Munich, this one I believed to be a good candidate but could be a little stagnant as not alot of info from events during a span of a week were available online, so I was unsure what else would be happening. The final option which is the one I chose was to visit 1940 London during the Blitz, this would provide tourists with first hand experience of the joys and terrors of those times, the joys being partys that used to be held to keep spirits high, and the terrors being the air strikes.
Niche Tourism
The targeted type of travellers are: Luxury Travellers.
These require a prestigious service and often have everything planned out, prioritising luxury accommodations with access to fine dining and exclusive amenities, due to this, the brand has been designed with this in mind, meaning that the colours and fonts chosen have to align with Time Travel Tour’s demographic.
PREPRODUCTION
LOGO PREPRODUCTION
How the logo evolved with each iteration:
V1
In this first version, I wanted to try and get an idea of how I was going to lay the whole thing out.
V2
In this version, I started to create my initial idea, and to make it have a luxurious style, I tried mixing up font types with certainn letters. This came together to create what I was trying to make which was a clockface.
V2.1
In this version, I wanted to emphasise that I was trying to create a clockface and I did this by extending the a arm to create a clock hand.
V2.2
In this version, I didn’t really like that idea of creating a clockface arm out of the A as it added too fine details for a logo, making it invisible when viewed in smaller formats.
V3
In this version, I tried changing things up as the previous style logos were too thin ad would get lost when scaled down, so this was a me taking a different approach, still keeping the clock but adding the company’s name to the clockface. One key feature I added to the clock are the blurred hands going anticlockwise, symbolizing the time travel to the past.
V3.1
This was simply a different colour variation of the logo before to see how it would work in different formats, with some tweaked elements to perfect it for specific use cases.
V3.2
This was simply a different colour variation of the logo before to see how it would work in different formats, with some tweaked elements to perfect it for specific use cases.
V4
I found that the Time Travel Tours text in the logos before wer’t very readable and blended in too much to the clockface, so I went with a different approach taking inspiration from UI switches.
V4.1
This variation is where I tried playing around with the tours text underneath as it looks odd with lots of empty space, so by trying to fill it, I went with the decisio to try extending the spaces of the letters TOURS.
V4.2
The extended letters of the TOURS in the previous versio aren’t very good interms of UX and made it a hard to read logo. To fix that, I went instead with reverting to the previous version, and adding some 1940s inspired lines, creating a unique look. After some feedback on this version, users even pointed out that the lines create a wing look which makes this logo even better, symbolizing travel but with. ahistorical twist.
V4.3
After multiple different versions, I’ve finally reached the final, this logo used what was good about the rest but simplified it for better accessibility across different use cases, whilst still keeping the core idea.
POSTER PREPRODUCTION
How the poster evolved with each iteration:
V1
In this first version, I began by trying to get a rough idea on text positioning and visual style. I chose to go with this gradient background with these specific colours as they symbolise calmness with the border adding sophistication. The addition of the plane wing to show travel. (All elements created by me)
V2
In this version, I wanted to tackle feedback, one of which were that the poster didn’t visibly have anything to do with time travel, so to fix that, II added a clock face created by me with blurred hand going anticlockwise, showing back travel.
V3
In this version, I found that the cream colour didn’t match the other elements and looked out of place, so I worked on changing up the colours on the clock face.
V4
This version consisted of a logo change and some slight perfections to word spacing.
V5
After multiple different versions, I’ve finally reached the final, this one changed things up quite a bit, going off feedback even further, specifically at one comment that mentioned that there was no visual hierarchy, making it confusing to read. To fix this, I decided to add text in one line making it easier to undertand, and moved the clock to the right to make space for this iteration , this allowed me to scale up the clock face making it the centre piece .
PRODUCTION
LOGO
POSTER
Main Poster
AI Assisted Poster
London Blitz Holiday Poster
POSTER Mockup
EVALUATION
Peer Feedback
Summary
Positive
- Good typography
- Like the clock face design
- Like the colours used
- Like the idea
Negative
- Didn’t like the unique letter a in the middle (this has been since changed based on user feedback.)
- Errors in letter formation (have been fixed based on user feedback)
Advanced Feedback
Summary
- Poster looked disjointed (this has since been changed)
- Logo could be made easier to read by simplifying it (This has since been changed)
Final valuation
The primary objective of this project was to create a new brand for Time Travel Tours, with 2 posters, 1 for a holiday destination, and another for the company itself, along with a logo. I feel that I have been successful in doing this, I’ve gone through many revisions, perfecting each deliverable one by one, using feedback to help me improve and grow my skillset, along with learning new skills along the way.
Overall learning outcomes – I have enhanced my abilities on poster creation, learning how to improve the layout ane general poster readability, I originally started not knowing too much on how to structure my poster design, often struggling with element placement, size and consistency to finally having an understanding on how posters are seen and read by people, improving the way I make posters in the future. One of the main areas I struggled on was how to get across the time travel message without using words and instead relying on semiotics, my decision to achieve this was to create a clock face with blurred hands travelling anti-clockwise, which was dont to symbolise time travelling backwards, now in doing this, I found it looked a little off as I personally like to keep things symmetrical, and this made it hard to do so, but I went with it and perfected it, another area I struggled with was sentence placement, knowing where to place the heading, sub-heading and info, figuring out what size =, colour and fonts to use were also quite challenging but after research and trial and error, I believe I reached a point that makes the poster readable and easy to undertand whilst still looking eye catching.
Personal Improvements – With this project, I’ve seen improvements with my time management and planning which allowed me more time on parts that needed it, therefore creating a fuller finished product, although, there are certainly areas that still need improvement, whilst my time management has gotten better, it still isn’t where I’d like it to be, sometimes stressing about interim deadlines and what to move onto next which closer to the end, I felt more at ease.
Future Recommendations – I feel that I sometimes need to take a step back, thing about the full project before I dive in, because this one felt a little all over the place with me trying to work on multiple areas at the same time which at times became a little stressfull and didn’t allow me to put alot of thought into some areas which in the end left me with some poster designs that I wasn’t too pleased with.
Conclusion – I overall really enjoyed working on this project and how it really tested my limits whilst also improving my skills, in the more specific area of poster designs as this is the first time I’ve really worked in this area of graphic design.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
RESOURCE SITES USED
Holiday planning
- https://www.discoverwalks.com/blog/germany/10-most-famous-historical-events-that-happened-in-germany/
- https://www.carnegiehall.org/About/History/Carnegie-Hall-Icons/Billie-Holiday