Volition
Brand style shifting app.
Prompt
For a long time now I have been discontent with the current look of advertisements in social media. Oftentimes I am shown mediocre visuals that clash with what I experience in my feed. I feel as though many of these companies could be more enticing to me should I be presented with more compelling visuals, as at the moment all they make me want to do is scroll away from them. What I have done with this project is come up with an idea for a solution: an app which allows the users to dictate the look of the advertisements they receive so it may provide a more compelling visual.
Images from Instagram
In order for this idea to work as intended I needed to look for many different design and art styles. I looked through different historical practices as well as reinterpretations of some of the classics. What I landed on was a list of varied artistic and design styles that would showcase the variety that the app could offer. Along with this, I selected several recognizable brands to be used as flagships for these style shifts. Each brand chosen has a strong individual style and look, but what this app strives to do is to recontextualize them for any possible art or design style imaginable.
Styles and Brands
Images from Google.
Vaporwave
The first style is vaporwave, a style which combines aesthetics from the 1980's, 1990's, and 2010's. The main colors that define it are pinks, blues, yellows, white, and black. It typically uses grids, simple shapes, gradients, palm trees, setting suns, and line-work, usually resulting in a chaotic/nostalgic look. The brands used to show this were Pepsi, Burger King, and Hershey's. While starting out, I went for more muted colors and less overall consistency between the three, but after several iterations I landed on the gradient filter on real images with the bright colors and grids that define the style.
Pop-Art
The second style is Pop-Art, a style which is "based on modern popular culture and the mass media." The route I went with this was specifically the comic book look that is often portrayed. In order to do this I applied half-tones over a gradient to give it that dot-look and used thick outline strokes. Initially the products seemed to not be emphasized enough, so their position was altered to bring them more into the forefront. I also got rid of the stroke on the starburst effect behind each of the posters. A shadow effect was also added to the text bubbles to give them more emphasis.
Hands and face based on stock image references.
Bauhaus
The third style is Bauhaus, a style that focuses on attempting "to unify the principles of mass production with individual artistic vision." While the Pepsi and Burger King posters were not particularly focused on showing this mass production, the Hershey's poster went through several iterations before I landed on the final look of various bars and, wrappers, and ingredients as the selling point. The Pepsi ad's main changes were arrangement of the shapes and shifting the emphasis of the Pepsi name. The shifts in the Burger King ad's were mainly due to the inclusion of too many colors initially.
Font used was custom iteration on example font shown in "Styles and Brands."
Futurism is a style of art emphasized by "dynamism, speed, technology, youth, violence, and objects such as the car, the airplane, and the industrial city." In order to properly show this, and to relate its subject with the following two styles, I chose to showcase the style with Ford, Amtrak, and American Airlines. In order to get the look of the style right, I used a program called Deep Dream Generator in order to achieve the painted quality that the style has. In order to do this I created a base design using gradients in order to teach the AI how to treat the pieces.
Futurism
Modern
Modern design is characterized by two main qualities to me: minimalist shapes and Helvetica. In order to follow through with this,
I reduced the main element's of each company (the Ford truck, the Amtrak train, and American Airlines plane) into their most recognizable elements: front facing truck, side of the train, fin of the plane. The Ford and Amtrak posters needed more reduction as they started out with too many elements or not matching the style of the other posters. Eventually I landed on the designs at the end, showcasing the main elements that I mentioned earlier.
Collaging is an art practice that I've seen done a lot in magazines a lot. While maybe not expressly pulling from the art form, the style has seen a fair amount of use recently along with Modern design.
I wanted to show this style in a way that felt right through a sort of scrapbook feel more-so than the traditional collage look. In order to do this I used torn paper effects, drop shadows, and push pins to make it look like either collected pieces or past travel experiences to showcase the best use of the product/band. All of the photos used for the collages were found in Google Images.
Collage/Scrapbook
App
What is shown here is the app, the mode in which users can make their advertisements look the way they do as shown above. When going through the selection process, you are shown before and after pictures of what ads look like prior to the app and after the chosen style. Once selected, the home screen changes to showcase your chosen style so you are reminded which is currently active.
The process of getting your social media account added is also very simple, where all you need to do is sign in on your preferred media platforms in order to activate the app on them. The app is opt in.
Note: Original ad displayed here is hypothetical.
Note: Original ad displayed here is hypothetical.