OUGD405 - Study Task 01

Today we were given a study task that involved us re-branding a company and coming up with a concept. We were split up into 10 groups of boys and girls, with only 5 companies to go between us. My group were given Fosters Lager.
We first started off with trying to come up with a concept. A concept is a starting point, that everything can be based off. For example, the Fosters current concept is feeling relaxed and chilling out with a beer. Their tag-line, "good call" resonates this concept, as they are reinforcing that having a Fosters will make you feel good and relaxed.
We had a few ideas but struggled to get something solid. We started looking at Australian culture and how relaxed they are, as opposed to how stereotypical British people are usually quite uptight and stressed a lot. We thought we could portray this by a "relaxing on the beach" vibe, but that idea didn't really work. We also tried thinking of ways we could use negative space, but again, we had no luck.
There were several different concepts that we'd tried, and here they are produced digitally:

At this point we were struggling with ideas. Nothing we had produced had a strong enough concept for us to take forward and develop. We talked to Danny, and he suggested that we just show it how it is, a no-nonsense cheap lager.

We decided to run with that, and develop this idea. We kept the same colour scheme as the original Fosters (Gold and Blue), as we felt that it didn't really need changing, it fits the target audience - adult male, and keeps the identity of Fosters Lager.

We experimented with different colours:

We decided that the paler blue was too feminine  to appeal to the target audience, so we changed it to a darker blue that is more true to the original: 

We also experimented with the addition of a tagline "just lager":

But we decided to keep that out, as it wasn't really working with the rest of the design as it was quite hard to see. We also looked at making half of the O yellow, to represent beer:

Here is our final outcome:

I personally don't like the design that my group produced. It's hard to work within a group with different personalities and design methods. I felt like my ideas didn't really get taken into consideration, but its hard to please everyone when working within a group.