Comparison Websites

I looked at a few comparison websites, most of them were serious ones, but I also looked at comparethemeerkat.com as well, because of how it has a relaxed, jokey tone to it which is what I want to achieve in what I produce. I looked at it because obviously it’s a spin off of an actual comparison website, and so I thought it’d be interesting to see how an actual comparison site would go about creating that sort of attitude. The most fun looking and engaging serious website I found was Trivago, which  I think works because of the bright colours, it’s simplicity and it’s positive tone. It doesn’t portray anything of the websites as any better or worse than the others though, which I find a bit odd.

Trivago's Home Page

Compare The Meerkat's Home Page

Comparing the above two to the two below, confused.com and uswitch, you notice how the use of pastel shades with white is less engaging. I also feel they have a more serious layout than the previous two, as there are a lot more options available made available to the use instantly, to the point where it seems a bit overwhelming. Whilst the Trivago layout is very much straight to the point, I do feel that it's a lot more casual and relaxed than the two below.

Confused.com's Home Page 

uSwitch's Home Page 

Student Cook Books

When I looked at Student Cookbooks I found that there were two distinct styles of them. The first style is reflected in images above, with thin text and Marks and Spencer style photography. Personally I don’t think that this is massively different to any other cookbook, and doesn’t reflect the sort of happy-go-lucky approach most students have towards cooking, and it comes across as something more serious, maybe something a mother would use to make meals for her family. The second type is reflected in the images below. I think the bolder, more in-your-face style of them is more reflective of students attitudes towards cooking, and so this is the sort of style I need to use. 

Clearly both these books have a massively bright use of colour, and I'm not sure how I feel about that. It's probably necessary as I know from experience that most students take a lot of encouraging to do some proper actual cooking, and so having something bright that grabs your attention and induces a positive attitude is probably a good thing. I do think that they've gone a bit over the top though, particularly the one on the right. I say this because the 'For Dummies" book is part of a series, and so the bright yellow is necessary for their branding. The red used in the other book however, seems to be completely random, and the contrast it has with the orange text is quite poor, "Ultimate Student" stands out a lot more than "The" and "Cookbook".

Looking at this range of books now makes me wish I'd researched them more and earlier on in the project, as they have the exact tone of voice which I was trying to achieve in my booklet.

Supermarket Branding

Morrisons is the largest supermarket chain in the UK, because of this, it very much has the image of being the peoples supermarket, at least in the North anyway. It’s bright yellow and green colour scheme gives of a happy vibe, and it’s TV adverts are generally quite light hearted and upbeat, more recently having Ant and Dec cast in them for humour.

Waitrose is the exact opposite of Morrisons in that it has an image of being expensive and upmarket. This is reflected in it’s branding which is mainly very clean and minimalist being white with little bits of green. which has connotations of health. Morrisons has a much more jolly attitude than Waitrose purely because of it’s branding. 

Budget supermarkets tend to have similar branding. LIDL and Aldi are both examples of these shops, and both use basic shapes and basic colours in their logos to reflect the basic service that they provide, The fact that one uses a bold gothic font whereas the other uses a slab serif font suggests that it is the shapes and colours used that can give you an idea of what sort of pricing a supermarket offers more so than the font.

COP - Theory Into Practice - Finalised Idea Rationale

After the presentations the other day, I decided that I wanted to stick with the idea of the valuation of art, as part of the research I did for my essay was to look at how art is priced and why it costs so much money, and I came to discover that the art market is almost completely unregulated.

I didn't really think much of this at first, but the I put how disastrous this could potentially be in a different context. What if, for example, the food market was unregulated. Food shops could start charging £10 for a loaf of bread etc.

But I decided that I wanted to concentrate more on how the galleries control the art world in general, as I believe that this gives me a lot more scope for creativity.

I wanted to produce something that reflected this, and took the angle that the gallery is evil. I then realised that the idea of good and evil is synonymous with children's fairy tales, and that with modern art being the way it is, a lot of people are of the opinion that "a child could do that", and so producing a fairy tale book seemed to make sense to me.

I then identified what characters could be included in my fairy tale from the art valuation process. I spoke to my younger sister about fairy tales that she knew for quite a while, and after talking to her it became clear that the story of Cinderella lends itself nicely to what I want to do.

Cinderella - Artist

Evil Step-Mum - Gallery Owner

Wicked Sisters - Gallery Secretary and Auctioneer

Prince - Cut-Off Owner

Context
The reason I've chosen to produce this publication is because I think that generally, people who're involved in the art world seem to be cut off from the rest of general society but it's unclear why. 

After doing my research and finding out about the control that galleries have over the art world, I discovered that they can not only essentially control who becomes an artist, but they can also help or hinder an artists success by their decisions when pricing the art, which is something completely out of the hands of the artists. This is a surprisingly simple and logical process, and it only exists because the galleries take advantage of the fact that the art industry is unregulated.

I believe that by producing this book I can put simply the problems within the industry to the point where children could understand them, which will be helped by the fact that the story will be based around an existing well-known story. By putting it in the form of a fairy tale I can not only position the gallery as evil, but I can personalise the whole problem around a singular main character.