YCN Marks & Spencer Picnic Brief
Traditional Japanese Picnic
Traditional Japanese Picnic
In our third year of university, we were asked to choose from a variety of competition briefs from the YCN website (here). I chose the Marks and Spencer brief, which requested a design for a themed picnic, to be sold in Marks and Spencer's stores. I chose to do a Traditional Japanese picnic. I started off by looking at traditional bento boxes and the typical style of these. I looked at how the food was served in these and found out that some were set out in courses, with boxes that stacked up in the order of which they were to be eaten. I used this idea to create the inside boxes of the packaging. Each box stacks up in the order it's eaten, starting with starter, then main course, dessert and ending with 'extras'. Each box has the Japanese and English for the course it is written on the top and then inside it has the Japanese for each food and a brief description of it. The starter box contains sushi, a cucumber and nashi (Japanese pear) salad and duck gyoza (dumplings). The main course box includes tempura prawns with a soy dip and a spicy flavoured rice. The dessert box contains mochi (sweet rice cakes), dorayaki (Japanese pancakes) with a raspberry dip and Strawberries. The 'Extras" box contains a Pomegranate and Green Tea Juice drink, chopsticks, soy sauce and some 'learn Japanese cards' and 'learn Origami cards'. I kept the boxes traditional bento box colours, black on the outside and a dark red on the inside. For the outside, I wanted to have it with a handle, to make it easier to carry around. I looked at Japanese patterns, ranging from kimono patterns to Japanese art. I ended up looking at the Japanese blue and white china patterns and designed my own. For the label on the front I used a simplistic type and put the Marks and Spencer logo on.
This is my finished picnic. I created a chopstick holder and bottle label in the same style. The packaging shown isn't to scale, as the bottle and chopsticks would be able to go inside the box.
This is the simplistic typographical label design I came up with.
This is the pattern I designed for the packaging, made up into an origami crane, as shown on the 'learn origami cards'
This is my bottle label design, designed in the same style as the packaging.
Learn Japanese cards. Teaching very basic Japanese to beginners. Ties in with the traditional Japanese experience.
Learn origami cards, showing how to do make an origami crane and an origami panda.
