The Lemonaid

The Lemonaid project – An idea of attracting via curiosity.

The idea was to spread a business card with basically nothing on it except for a QR code linking to a one-page-website and see how many visitors you could get.
The concept first thought up with derived from having had the old saying "If life gives you lemons, make lemonade" in my head for at least a week. With it being an internationally, well known, slogan for making the best of the situation I thought it might at least bring a smile to the faces of my visitors. I first designed the business card with a lemon having the code peeled out of it. For obvious reasons this did not work as the code couldn't be scanned. Back at the drawing board I rendered a citric pattern in photoshop and put the QR on top of it with a blending mode allowing for some transparency of the pattern below. It now scans! Below I put the text "Curiosity drives us" to really get people intrigued and excited to know what was going to happen once they've scanned the code. Also I included, in very fine print on the back a 3 step instructional guide for use of the card stating:
1. Scan QR code
2. Enjoy fruits of labor
3. Take this card and leave it somewhere for someone else to find

Some of the ways I had in mind for distributing these cards where, amongst others, to sneak them into peoples pockets, backpacks, purses or things alike during nights out in different clubs/bars as well as discretely dropping them of at peoples tables, bar tops and maybe the occasional random mailbox.
In addition to this I also thought of placing cards in the public space in ways that it would catch your eye even if only passing by.
I ordered the business cards, bought the domain the-lemonaid.com and set up a single page viewing an image with the quote in, what I first thought, was an artsy typographic style and added some motivational copy to it. After looking over and over at the site and the design I figured it was really cheesy which led me in to a whole new direction. I drew up a step by step guide on how to make lemonade in Illustrator and reformatted the whole idea of having the site the code led to, being nothing more than a pictorial guide on how to make lemonade. After trying out different texts in addition to the graphics I settled with the site's name along with a small slogan at the bottom. The finished design was made in such a way that I could have it printed and put on the wall as a fun/cool poster.

Fonts used are:
Arial Black
Bebas Neue
Century725 Black
Print Clearly

The colors chosen is a soft dampened yellow tone with white graphics and text to make the whole thing easy on the eye while still being easy to read. Yellow is a color, not only associated with ripe lemons, but also with wellbeing and optimism. The copy at the bottom got a darker tone still within the yellow color spectrum just to stand out a bit and act as a type of corporate logo at the bottom.
On top of the design I finally added a canvas pattern to add a little depth and to make it look a bit like it was printed on cloth.
Below is a slideshow that displays a couple of the images both used as inspiration as well as for the finished product. Click the image to view the next one if your patience is running low.