Essence Cosmetics Redesign

Essence Cosmetics rebrand project

Deliverables

Design Statement

This project as a whole has taken place over the course of thirteen weeks and has given me an opportunity to explore branding through different deliverables and experiments. In Assessment 1, I conducted multiple experiments in logo design, packaging and photography to prepare for the execution of this project, as well as laid the groundwork to build assessment two.

After reassessing my design brief and refining what I valued about this rebrand project, I prepped by creating a customer persona, mood board and timeline before launching into my logo design. This process was very intensive and time-consuming, I truly wanted to perfect the design and have it capture the mood I was going for for my rebrand. I aimed for it to have a sleek and clean appearance while still carrying visual interest that would stand out on the shelves of a cosmetic store. Overall, I am really happy with the final logo and think it was a great starting point to build off to create interesting deliverables that matched my design brief down the line. Based on my logo, I built the style guide, chose which colours matched the redesign and showed the logo well, as well as choosing a typeface that complemented the excentric design of the letters.

My packaging design took more research into what products I would be designing for and what information each element would display. I chose to do a foundation, blush, lip gloss and serum and took after actual products produced by Essence Cosmetics. I initially struggled with the daunting process, but as I found a design I was happy with and fell into a rhythm, I ended up pleased with the final result I had created through Illustrator. This led me into the printing stage, where I measured the products I had on hand and reformatted the design to match their measurements. Building these prototypes was challenging, but seeing the flat design in 3D was rewarding and cemented that I was happy with the design I had created.

Photography was also a very daunting stage of the process. I am relatively experienced with photography and familiar with a camera, composition and lighting. In saying this, I did struggle to capture the high-quality photoshoots that I wanted with materials at home. After many photoshoots, I was able to pick out images I liked and also used an at-home, light box studio to capture detailed images for the website.

Although I did have some experience with Figma in my A1, I had many ideas that I struggled to execute because I was unfamiliar with the program and most tutorials were above my knowledge of Figma. After many attempts, I decided I was becoming too focused on the user experience rather than the actual design – which should have been my focus. Aesthetically speaking, I really like the website design, especially considering I was handling software I was really unfamiliar with and struggled with.

Finally, I decided to create an actual fake Instagram account to mock up what their Instagram page would look like under this new branding. At this point, it was very much putting together what I already had created to display the branding, products and photography in a tangible and realistic context for the brand. This deliverable was really enjoyable and I had a lot of fun creating these elements.

In reflection, I am really proud of the project I have put forward and have also gained fruitful knowledge and skill from the whole process. The experience has been very rewarding, with such a loose brief for the project, I had the freedom to grow as a designer and a creator and explore avenues of design I was truly interested in. This project has shown how much I have grown as a designer as well as how much I still have to learn and grow as I enter my working life.

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