Fall 2014- Online Advertising- Project 2

Topics: |  Project 2  |  Concept  |  Logo  |  Theme  |  Campaign  |  App  |  Site  |  Magazine  |  Result  |

Project 2- Bluelist Social App
For the second project in my Online Ad course, we were set to design a brand for Bluelist, a dating/social app that was based on a real Crowdspring design contest for this app, with a $200 reward.

Concept
For the overall idea of the design, I knew that, to start, my color scheme would be predominantly white and blue. At first, I was focused on the potential romance aspect of what I thought the project was, but later focused more on the communication and social points, instead.

Process- Logo

Logo 1- Click any to enlarge

As stated above, I started out in the mindset that the app was for romance. As such, I created a very flowy, romance site-esque icon using the letters of the brand's name. I also used a Pantone pink color for contrast with the blue, in the vein of romance.

When I corrected my understanding of the brand, I decided to greatly simplify things. I wanted to focus on the technological side of the brand, as well as the fact that it's for social messaging. As such, I decided to work with messaging bubbles, and work my way into the rest of the logo design from there.
What I came up with is what you see to the right, a logo simple enough to be used anywhere, and able to be used to represent the idea I was going for. There were a number of iterations, before I decided to make the message bubbles' shapes match the B's curves and hard lines.

Process- Theme

Once I had my logo designed, it was pretty simple to carry it through to the brand's theme/tagline design. I extended the message bubble, and used the font I decided to add to the brand, Helvetica Neue, into the bubble. I also made sure "connect" was interlocked, or connected.


Process- Online Ad Campaign


I actually completed the look to my ad campaign before I created the new logo and theme, and they're what made it possible to decide how I wanted the rest of the brand to look and feel. These were also the fastest I've ever concepted and created an ad campaign, this semester or otherwise. Though I updated them when I created the final logo, which I made the app's phone icon here That said, I'll definitely be coming back to these, since after the fact, it was made apparent just how muddy the color for the characters came out against the brand's blue.

As another aspect of the online ad campaign, we had to apply our ads somewhere it would be relevant, and create a mailer campaign. I chose Pandora for the adspace, since the app focuses on bringing people with shared interest together, and music is one of the best communities for such a thing.

For the mailer, I created a fourth ad as I did the first three, and applied it to a stock photo I got in a recent design bundle purchase.








Process- Landing Site

The next step was the landing site design. At the same time I came up with my ad campaign, I initially created a graphic showing how the app would work, having multiple people on their phones with representations of the bluetooth connecting them to each other. It was a bit too complex for the ads, but it worked out fantastically for my landing site, at least after I made it black and white so my text would show through.


Process- App
When I finished the landing page, the app design was simple, quick work. I plugged the logo into a mockup of an iPhone for the icon, and applied the look of my ad design to the actual app's design first. Once I had that flat, I plugged in another stock image from that bundle pack into the background, giving it a lot more depth and life.






Process- Magazine Article
The final step in the process was designing a look for a magazine article discussing our brand's new app. There were a few false starts where I had typesetting issues, but this was designed quickly enough. When I had the layout designed, I then plugged it into one more stock image, showcasing that it was an iPad-scaled magazine.





Results
Overall, I'm pretty happy with how this whole project came out. I'm even happier that I did it in a real-world, 2 week schedule. There are things I'll be tweaking next semester, certainly, but this shows how far my skill level came from where I started at the beginning of the semester.