This week I was having a bit of fun with creating details for the project. I worked out that I could use UV mapping to add a label to the can. I didn’t what to use a real brand (/I don’t think I could use a real brand even if I wanted to…) so I took this opportunity to create a fake brand. I used Pinterest as inspiration. I wanted a really colourful brand that looked not only graphic but gave the sense that it was a cheaper brand of fizzy drink.
I wanted a tongue in cheek brand name. I wanted a something that would nod to climate change but had difficultly coming up with a name to fit this. But instead I thought of “Dutty Juice”, dutty being Jamaican patois for dirty. I wanted it to be a nod to it being an extremely sugary “dirty” drink. I wanted it to look appealing yet unappealing.
Photoshop
I first started in Photoshop where I could sketch out my initial ideas and create some colour schemes. I looked at brands like Fanta for inspiration as I liked how the brand used fruit on the packaging. I wanted to make it quite cheeky by adding a peach and for a different flavour which was aubergine.
I started with the peach flavour and liked the idea of having a pink and blue theme to start off with. I created a few artboards so that I could be quite free and experiment.
Illustrator
It had been ages since I had used Illustrator so was very keen to get back into it. I wanted to use illustrator as I had used it before for creating typography and thought it would be idea to get that clean graphic / vector look I wanted to achieve. I used a random Coke label I got from Google images as a way to help me proportion the label.
I started off by just tracing the design I created in Photoshop. In hindsight, I maybe could have just cut the peach and stuck it into the Illustrator design but I wanted it all to be vector. After tracing the peach and droplets, it was just a case of using the colour picker to select the colours I wanted from the original design.
I then moved onto the typography. I found a font from Adobe Fonts that I liked that I thought would go with the theme.
I like the font but thought it wasn’t super clear when I had it on the background I wanted. So I just slightly adjusted some of the letters like the U, Y and A’s. I just had do something called Expand Appearance which turned the letter into adjustable shapes. From there I could use the Shape Builder Tool to cut out the shapes to make them more readable.
From there I could use the colour picker to add the desired colours and added multiple strokes with different colours to give it a more retro feel. I then added a warp so that there was a bend to the words. I added a drop shadow to both the words and the peach and droplets.
For the background I then added a stroke that thinned out towards the centre and duplicated it around the centre. I added a soft light blending mode against the pink background.
The details on the peach were achieved by creating shapes that had gradients and then a Blur effect added on top.
For the nutritional information and the other things found on a can.
I then duplicated the document and just adjusted the colours which was easy, then got some reference images from Google and used the pen tool to draw the Aubergine.
I think I will need to do some tweaking but I was pretty happy with how it was looking so far.