Based upon response to your designs by me and the client on 4/1, I recommend the following:
You review and/or re-write the design project briefs so you know exactly what the project entails and what client is expecting regarding each your design projects. Then clarifying your design intentions for each of those projects.
In case you may have missed it, the client is primarily looking for new creative ideas and design directions for their packaging, their logo, as well their social media. Lisa will take your final ideas and design directions, then utilize them to help her come up with her final design solutions, so your fresh design ideas and directions are what they are hoping for.
At the same time, our client is evaluating your designs by their established marketing and product positions which determined their original designs. This situation is common in the world of design. It makes it a challenge however for a designer to come up with something new and exciting, while at the same time fitting it into the client’s established perceptions.
A case-in-point is APN’s desire for a fresh design look, but a reluctance towards a more trendy and new color palette. This scenario of juggling client’s “needs” vs “wants” is very typical in the real design world. The design approach I have used most often with this scenario is to concentrate on the audience’s needs and wants. This helps me create a concept and a message that meets actual design’s needs, and in-turn usually please everyone in the process.
Contemporary package designs are really specialized print advertisements used to present the actual product in a physical package format and a selling context.
You learned in Design History that the key to a visual message is the relationship between word and image. A good design strategy for the packages would be to take an Object Poster semiotic approach, or a simplified Constructivist Messaging approach.
In short, make sure your package designs have the necessary message components in them, such as the product Logo or Name, a communicative background, a contextual Image (pet, and/or owner, or both), a Image of the product itself, and the product's features/benefits, etc, but they need to simple and expressive (this is really what the design “clean and simple” really means). Then make sure the components have the appropriate hierarchy and position within the layout to take advantage of their visual and semiotic relationships to one another to create a message about, and/or a positioning of, the product in the customer’s mind. In short, don’t decorate, but construct a compelling and effective visual message using design.
Other Suggestions:
As far as icons go, if you can't come up with new icons that work as well as the originals, then use their icons. I do however think that the existing icons could be simplified and/or revamped and made stronger visually. I also think that edited text in simplified graphic and expressive formats (like the check-box) could also be just as effective as an icon that needs text with it to work.
Hopefully by now you understand that APN is looking for a new logo that stresses what the name of the company already says “Made in America”. While their current logo of the dog and cat may not express the MIA concept as strongly as it could, it is a good logo. Don’t insult Lisa by trying to give her a revamped version of her logo that is worse design than the original. The company needs a new implified expressive symbol, but not an illustration - you guys should know this.
To help, I also suggest you approach the logo project also as a message, but a symbolic one. A predominately text-base logotype might work better than pictographs of pets. Or a very simple configuration of a flag signifier (not a picto of the whole flag, but a graphic abbreviation that signifies the US) with, or within, the name of the company. Or perhaps a flag signifier configured with a pet signifier (again, not a necessarily a picto of the pet, but maybe an index sign standing in for the pet like a paw print that signifies a pet), then supported by the words. I have though more about Matthew's question regarding the use of the acronym APN for the logo, and I am not thinking that a configuration of a flag signifier, and maybe a pet signifier, with the letters could work if the design is simple, striking and works small.
Lastly, put your social media designs in the format that they will be used to see if they work. That way you can see immediately if the typefaces you choose, the images, the colors, sizes of elements will work.
In fact, it would be smart to test all of your design possibilities for all of your projects as you work on them, by putting them into applicable contexts to see how effective they might be.
