Water Bottle Design Rationale and Feedback

What I really wanted to achieve with this bottle poster was to get the message across in a different way to the designs we were shown to begin with. I wanted it to look fun and arty instead of corporate and cold, and that’s why I came up with the sketch, having little water droplets climbing out of the bottle in protest. I also had a more serious idea with a water bottle with all the names of the chemicals that go into the plastic seeping out into the water with the slogan ‘convenience comes with a price’. I showed these sketches to a few people and they said that both the ideas were good, so I made a start. Unfortunately I left things a little too late and I left the water droplets idea and went with the more serious concept.

Once I started, I received feedback that having the chemicals seeping out into the water was more complex that it had to be – the most important thing was that the message was clear. This didn’t matter though because I had created a background that I could keep, I just needed to change the message. I went with a solid sky blue background with a solid white outline of a plastic bottle because it was simple and wouldn’t take away from the eventual message.

My new concept was to have my slogan ‘convenience comes with a price’ left aligned in a sludgy, sick looking typeface. I also came up with having ‘say no to buying plastic bottles’ underneath the slogan to make the message clearer. I had a lot of issues with the type because the font I originally chose and was set on using (Blood Crow) looked wrong. I went through so many typefaces that I thought personified poison and chemicals, but nothing was working, so I decided that I would have to move away from those particular fonts and try something more simple to go with the simplicity of my imagery. I finally found something I was happy with – a bold sans serif font, Lazy Sans, which blended in perfectly with the image of the bottle. My next challenge was picking the colours. I originally had grey and white, but then I decided I needed some black to make the message stand out. I had ‘convenience comes with a price’ in black and ‘say no to buying plastic bottles’ in white but it didn’t look quite right, so I reversed them and asked for some feedback on which looked better. I was told they both looked good and it all came down to which message I thought was the most important to communicate. I ended up choosing the reverse (having the convenience message in white at the top and the say no message in black underneath it) and was really happy with it. I then decided I wanted to have some more information on there, such as a reason why convenience came with a price and why people should say no to buying plastic bottles, so I added a fact down the bottom in small white type ‘producing 1 litre of bottled water can emit 100 times more greenhouse gases than 1 litre of tap water’. I chose this fact because I thought it was the most relevant to the current issues surrounding greenhouse gases and carbon emissions. I was happy with this choice as it completed my poster.

I received very positive feedback for the final product – I got the message across effectively whilst having an aesthetically pleasing poster and I am very happy with the final result. I liked that I had to make so many changes to this because I got to learn more and work harder to get the best results possible.

Water Bottle Project Roughs;
Unfortunately I was unable to find my digital roughs for this project, but here are the sketches;