Brief 2: Collaborative Brief - Luxury Chocolate Brainstorming

A couple of days ago self and Charlie agreed that we would do a collaborative brief together. This was mainly because we both have similar briefs in the fact that I wanted to do a luxury food brief, and Charlie was going to do a food brief herself. We both had similar ideas in what we wanted to achieve from these briefs so we decided that instead of doing these briefs, we would work together as a collaborative and create one outcome which covers all the bases in what we wanted to achieve.

We very quickly agreed on the content being chocolate, and the style being luxurious. Both of us want to use this year to create more sophisticated and refined outcomes, so this brief is the perfect time to improve these skills individually and together.

We brainstormed the brief so that we had a clear idea of where we wanted to go.

While we haven't set a specific chocolate product, we believe that this will be decided when our initial research is done.

The main design elements we want to focus on is the branding and packaging of the products. While I am not entirely interested in following packaging design from start to finish, I do have an interest in creating design for this as I think it would be a good skill to have. Charlie is much more interested in packaging than I am, but I think working together we can put our strengths together to create something solid.

Within the packaging, as it is chocolates, depending on what product route we go down, there is also a small editorial element to the brief. This would be in creating the product fold outs/information booklets.

Another element that I am interested in is the promotion of the products. While Charlie has little interest in this, I think that if we have time at the end, creating promotional material - such as a mocked up large scale promotional campaign, it could be something really good to work in as it would be taking a product we created and seeing it through, as would be done in industry.

We also have the idea of a bespoke website where individuals can create their own boxes of chocolates as gifts etc. However this is just an idea right now as the outcome of this will be decided when we decide on the actual products we want to do.

We have decided that we will create the branding and guidelines immediately so that we can stick to these throughout and create a completely cohesive outcome.

At this point in time we have decided on creating a luxury chocolate brand which will be sold in high-end supermarkets (Waitrose/M&S) or luxury department stores (Harrods, Fortnum & Masons, Selfridges).

In terms of the timescale we tried to estimate how long we think it would take for us to go through each section of the brief, breaking this down to research, branding, production, testing & photography, proposals/final design boards. With these estimates we got to around 2 - 3 months, however this is not set in stone and is something that we will discuss when we decide on the date we will start this brief.