Karl Rogers - Graphic Design

Conclusion…

We have made our final visuals from the illustrations we recieved, and we are really pleased with the outcomes. We feel they do the brand justice, and they exploit the gap in the cricket market, as there doesn’t seem to be a big amount of advertising in this sector.

The visuals, in our opinion, stick to the brand guidelines whilst being both refreshing and visually interesting. These capture the attention of the audience well by using striking imagery.

Complete Images!

We recieved some finished images from the illustrators, which we were really impressed with, so decided to use them for our final visuals.

Illustrators…

The illustrators we had grouped up with were Sam Ginns and Kristian Johnson. We gave them our ideas to illustrators, and told them how we wanted to get the ideas across. We thought this would add a handmade feel, and a unique look to our advertisements. For any work that was not illustrated, we would work with them to create marker visuals to show how it would have looked (roughly). As their deadline is beyond ours, we didn’t expect them to create them in time.

Games Research…

As young people, we have the experience of playing games everyday. I, myself, have played plenty of online cricket games where i have become addicted, and have been forced to see certain advertisements. To make a successful game, though, it is important to immerse the user with a game that gets them involved. Here are a few games involving cricket:

Stick Cricket: http://www.online-game.tv/play/stick-cricket

REALLY addicted game. Very good game, but really simple! It has a addictive element to it, where theres a score to chase, its very easy to play and you can get competitive with other people playing the game. 

World Cricket: http://www.miniclip.com/games/world-cricket-2011/en/

This game is not so addicting. I couldn’t sit here for half an hour continuously playing this game. I don’t think it has the fun factor or the competitive element as stick cricket contains.

Top Spinner: http://www.flashcricket.com/topspinnerplay.php

Decent game.. I think it has a certain novelty to it, where you enjoy it the first few times, then you get frustrated, or bored. It does have a competitive element, though, which is really important.

Other games we can take inspiration from though are:

Bloody Pingu: http://www.methodshop.com/games/play/yeti/yeti1-blood.shtml

Controversial… But its a “bloody” addicting game! These types of simple games really get you hooked in to the competitive element, and the fact you want to hit it as far as you can. It’s a natural feeling from everyone. We could look into the layout too.

Another game i can remember on the ipod, was one where you had to hit an object as far as you could, where it would hit various things along the way (such as birds or comets depending how high the object is). These would obviously help you gain a better distance. It uses the same kind of set out as Bloody Pingu above and could be a starting point for our game!

Adverts we decided on…

We have decided what kind of advertisement we would go with, which include:

• Magazine Advert Series (4)
• Billboard (2)
• Web Banners (2)
• Web Rollover Image (1)
• Email (1)
• Online Game (1)
• Facebook Sponsor (1)

These are the adverts we will go for, as we feel they are most effective towards the typical cricketer. They will all pretty much work as the same campaign, but can still act as two seperate ones.

“When two becomes one…”

As we looked through our sketches of the final ideas, we found that the two campaigns joined together pretty well. We saw that they both emphasised how far the ball would travel using the G&M equipment. We also decided that a game might be viable, joining both ideas together where more points are awarder for the further you hit the ball.

Developing our ideas…

Soon after all the research, we decided to look back at our ideas and to expand on them, and to create the other campaign we were briefed to do. We firstly expanded our first campaign - where the ball is exagerated on how far it travels, and came up with a host of “fun” type adverts where the ball:

• Hits a bird
• Hits a English Landmark - eg BIG BEN
• Flies past an aeroplane
• Hits a satelite
• Hits a paraglider
• Hits a hot air baloon
• Travels through the clouds…

We decided to go with this idea with a slight cheeky hilarity factor. We thought this would work really well and it was, in our view, very campaignable. We prefered this to the normal ideas of “flying out of the UK”, or “Coming out of the stadium”. It had more imagination, and was more visually pleasing.

As we looked through our original sketches, we found a few we thought were ideas we could expand upon for our second campaign. This included the “Shooting Star” and the idea of a cricket ball making the craters on the moon. We found this had alot of scope. The whole space theme could be another campaign. We needed to find other ideas to make it campaignable and exciting.