Mini Art School: Introduction

For my first look into using design I will be looking into everyone's favorite seasonal food. I'm not talking about turkey, Halloween candy, pumpkin spice, or the Christmas goose, no. I'm talking about cookies that get sold by girls in uniforms every January. Specifically here I will be taking a look at the design on a girl scout cookie box.

On a side note, does this count as a beginner sin of a naked photo? It's easy to see where the border ends, but the cut from white to my blog background is still rather jarring. I do wish I was able to find a version of this picture without the white background. Regardless...



Audience
One of the main core driving principles of sales is that the money raised by selling girl scout cookies goes to fund the girl scout non-profit organization. Thus people buying these cookies are doing so as a sort of charity to fund a community of people that are well liked because of their good nature and community service goals. By placing an image of three scouts working on a project on the front of the box, people are reminded just why it is that they buy girl scout cookies. And just in case they're in it for the cookies and not the scouts... they also put a picture of the cookies on front too. Just in case.

Balance
This design does an excellent job with balance. The picture of the cookie is front and center while up top there's an off balance logo that allows for the picture of a girl scout doing community service to take the center. The girl scout logo with a quote in the upper corner is neatly balanced by the net weight marker in the lower corner as well.

Contrast
The strongest contrast on this box is between a concept and its description. There is also the center trefoil done in solid color over the background of an image. Aside from these points there is no distinct and blatant contrast, but it doesn't really need to go big or go home since the various concepts are not strongly distinct.

White Space
The lower left and upper right corners are left with nothing to occupy them except grass and sky.  There is also some blank space in the green trefoil the cookies are in and on the left, but most importantly there's no orphaned white space in between two elements.

Repetition
The trefoil is a girl scout associated logo. Repetition is typically considered bad, but is often a way for corporations to emphasize branding. Here the repeated trefoil (one large and one small) is another way to tie in to the fact that it is the girl scouts that sell these cookies. Additionally you can see on the side of the box that the picture of the cookies is repeated so as to be identifiable on any side, but I'm focusing my attention mostly on the box front.

Proximity
There are three main groupings of information on this box. The first grouping is the upper left corner where the girl scout logo is next to the words 'girl scouts' and  a quote about who the girl scouts are. It is put out of the way as a way to indicate that girl scouts are humble and even though these cookies are totally sold by them for funding, this product is about the cookies themselves which are front and center with their name 'thin mints' and an appetizing description of what thin mints are. Finally 'net weight 9.0 grams' is put out of the way not associated with anything else. It's mostly there because as a food item it is required, but this way it's not distracting to the consumer.

Alignment
Text is typically aligned with the side of the box it is adjacent to while the cookie name and description in the middle is center aligned to give it proper room amidst the middle of the trefoil.

Emphasis
There are two elements of emphasis on this design. The first is the cookies themselves and the second is the girl scouts. As the most important elements to address the audience (see above), they are the largest items on the cover. Meanwhile the small text of the net weight and girl scout logo de-emphasizes those aspects as does placing them off in corners.

Color
The featured color of this box is green. It is absolutely a coincidence that the girl scout logo is always done in green and white. Though perhaps not that much of a coincidence because thin mints are arguably the most iconic cookie of the girl scouts, though somoas and tagalongs are tough competitors. However the girl scout cookies keep a different reservation for their colors. Green is the color of thin mints while somoas are purple and tagalongs are red. Every other main color is assigned to its own cookie.

Typography
It is considered bad to have too many types of typography in the same design without reason. However the thin mint box (and other girl scout cookie boxes) breaks this rule successfully by using proximity to sidestep it. Each grouping of information addressed above had at most two types of font. The smaller font size and altered typography comes in primarily with the quote and the cookie description. Both of these are in small and subservient fonts to the more important title above them and the quote is practically unnoticed next to the background.

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Optional Activities

Activity #3:

In the first of these pictures my idea was to use straight lines to try to make repeating star shapes of various sides. In it you can see at least one five pointed star and two six pointed stars. I'm not super happy with it. In the second design I started with a fractal build, filled in some connecting lines, and in the end was left with three huge spaces in the lower corners and upper middle. White space isn't my enemy, but it wasn't doing anything here either so I decided to put in some prechosen icons there based on a whim. I will be very impressed if you figure out why I chose the three icons that I did. There is still white space overall, but now it's used to frame the icons in their spots rather than just sitting there. For reference, I used the rule for the lower option that all individual shapes can have at most four sides and all angles must be less than 180 degrees. And yes, this is two sides of the same napkin. I worked on this activity while having dinner. Old habit of drawing math equations I guess.

Optional Activity # 2 (repetition)

 In these three images I tried setting a background image to be transparent and use the overlay of repeating footprints to emphasize an idea of walking. There are definitely some rough edges on this like for instance my decision to break the cardinal sin of staircasing my title. I think that since there's overlap however it doesn't make it hard to read and I like especially the way the right hand one frames the mountain in the distance. I don't like how the text of the left hand one turned out, but I suppose that's why we did three. Honestly my favorite of the bunch is the one on the right because it strikes a chord of adventure along with personability, plus the footprints coming towards the viewer somehow works better than leading away or the abstract 'down the trail' of the middle one. Photos pulled from clipart, photostock, and google maps.

Primary source of advice used to analyze design:

Design Rules of Thumb. (n.d.). Retrieved February 03, 2017, from http://www.writedesignonline.com/resources/design/rules/index.html