This project was an assignment in Advertising Design, where we were instructed to research two comparable brands for a product or service. The assignment required each designer to identifying the market, identifying the product or service benefits and make sure the new advertisements pieces serve the product better than the original advertisements have before. I compared Sharpie and Prismacolor based upon their product benefits, artistic preference and printed marketing.
Some of Sharpie’s benefits were:
- Bright colors.
- Commonly used to make art on shoes, snowboards and skateboards.
- Childish persona.
- Comfortable grip.
- Lesser value/quality.
Sharpie’s advertisements expressed the product’s capabilities in action like use of bright colors and varying line widths. The ads were usually comical and were consistent with their printed branding.
Some of Prismacolor’s benefits were:
- Their archival properties.
- Wide range of colors across their colored pencils and artist quality markers.
- Their colored pencils correlated to their other products by color code.
- Higher value/quality.
- Considered a professional product, especially for illustration purposes.
Prismacolor’s printed marketing presence is nearly non-existent. What very few pieces I could find online might not have been actually printed, but they deliver a comparable campaign that shows their product in action and demonstrates their capabilities. However, brand consistency was not practiced.
This research encouraged me to take on the more difficult challenge of finding an engaging way of making a printed magazine advertisement for Prismacolor. It needed to be bold and show the product’s strengths while being a competitor against Sharpie. Since Sharpie is known for their bright colors, I decided to demonstrate how bright and bold Prismacolor colored pencils could be while being shown in a handmade drawing. Some 80’s rock album artwork seemed to be bold and daring with colors. This seemed like an opportunity to take with the Prismacolor colored pencils and really capitalize on their bright pigments. By recreating a version of a Boston album cover, I used it as the background of a printed ad with decorative vector text stating “Color from out of this world.” The bright colors are unexpected in colored pencils, but the text and the artwork express how you can get the bold color satisfaction commonly found with Sharpie in Prismacolor’s colored pencils and other products.
The second half of the assignment was to create a landing webpage for the same brand the magazine ad was to be designed for. I found in researching each brand that their landing pages were not consistent with their current marketing techniques, but instead were simply attempts to direct customers to specific parts of their websites or appeal to their senses. I was inspired by the Prismacolor code to Hex code feature on their website and decided to take a hex code color selection palette and recreate it entirely out of Prismacolor colored pencils. Once that was illustrated, I decided to animate it as if it is a loading screen in order to get viewers to take a second look at the page.
Completed Spring Semester 2017.
KCarlton Designs 