Ohh Deer Cushion Competition

The Brief:

"It's that time of year again, our annual pillow fight is upon us! We're looking of course for cushion designs to add to our collection."

Our cushions are stocked by lots of leading brands in the UK and we sell a lot direct to lovely customers through our website, they're one of the products people think of when they think Ohh Deer.


We test how popular your products are by putting them in the public domain. You can increase your ranking by getting your posts liked, tweeted and pinned (+ some other activity which you will see within your account) your entries will go on sale as soon as they're approved - you will get 20% of the profit (not the sale price) from each cushion, sales are heavily weighted and will dramatically boost your ranking.


The top ranking posts for the day will be visible at the top of the competition page, on the homepage and could be featured in our newsletters. You can submit a maximum of 4 designs (we're keen to see what your range might look like, so use the spaces wisely!)

How we pick our winners: designs will need to fit within the brand well, it'll need to be contemporary and have been shared by purchased by our audience."




Specifications:

All artwork submitted must be in JPEGformat.

The dimensions of your file must be 5315px x 5315px

Uploads close on the 15 November 2014.

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What problem is the brief setting?

They would like a new cushion design.

What does the brief require?

The brief requires a 5315px x 5315 px image, that fits into the brand of a design for a cushion.

Who will benefit?

Those who buy the cushions, and Ohh deer will make money from those extra ones on sale, as the majority of friends and family are likely to buy the competitors entries, so they will have a spike of sales.

Who is the audience?

Family and friends, and those who shop on Ohh Deer.

What are you expected to communicate to them?

A cushion design to go in any room.

How will that message/idea/concept be delivered?

Through any medium but must be submitted onto the website to be printed onto a cushion cover.

Why I chose to enter this competition:

I chose to enter this competition to get me warmed up for this module as a practice run for a more serious competition.

Research

To start off with I looked into what kind of cushion the company already sell:

I realised with the research that animals and puns are what's on trend with this company.

Design Idea's

I did a few rough sketches of ideas for cushions. I went with the idea of Minnie and cuddle time because that is the one that is closest to my heart. I think they are all relatively kitsch idea's that would suit the company.

Finished Design:

I think my design wasn't very successful overall. The font is pretty abysmal. I'm glad I've done this though because it's made me realise how important font is. I also think that the technique I used probably wasn't the best. I started off with a watercolour painting of minnie. And then I drew on top of this scanned in. I've never really drawn on the computer properly before, but I treated myself to a bamboo tablet so I really wanted to try it out. I think it's safe to say I'll just keep it for sketching for now. Maybe I'll try again later in the year with more knowledge.

I decided to only enter one design to this competition because I spent more time than I ought to on this design and I realised that this competition was a popularity contest over anything else and the only way for the design to go up in ranking was for friends and family to buy the cushion. I think that this is quite difficult because they are actually more expensive than they should be and it's like they are exploiting those upcoming designers by getting their friends and family to buy into it, even though they always stick with the same illustrators.