Personal Project | “The Inappropriate Ads”
All of this started with a design competition in an online forum. The topic of the competition were to design a beer label for the official forum beer. I got a hold of a few stock images of bottles and started thinking about what I would make out of the forum logo and what colors to use. After a day or two I checked the thread and there it was. Someone had already made what was in my head! That made me lose a bit of interest in the competition but still felt like finishing the beer label-project.
After a while I drifted on to just redesigning Heineken's label in a retro but still contemporary style. When I was almost finished with my design I accidentally put a layer copy on top with it's blending mode set to "exclusion". This inverted the colors of the Heineken label and the colors that sprung up was really lively and youthful. I finished the Heineken design but later on decided I wanted to make a kids beer label. With this is being a really, frowned upon, and quite touchy subject I felt it was a really good type of project. I took the whole Heineken design and inverted the colors of the label and, using the same typeface that the original Heineken label had, named it Starbrew. To make it even more obvious that it was meant for inappropriately young people I added the word "Kids" to the label. Then I added the copy at the bottom. "Cool kids have great taste".
After the beer bottle was made I put it aside to work on another project that I had found inspiration for both in earlier students work in one of the schools I'm applying for, as well as in the section on tips for what to put in your portfolio at the Danish Media and Journalism College.
The thing was to make an ad for Tabasco hot sauce.
Coming from the beer label
and the fact that I am a bartender I thought, I'll make an ad for a fusion product between Tabasco and Absolut vodka. Absolut is a company that is always coming out with new flavored vodkas and this project did not feel very far off a real life product.
I cut, copied, pasted, typed and transformed. Dodged, burned, liquified and adjusted. In the end I had made an ad that I thought was quite good.
Looking at the "Tabascolut"-bottle, the idea of making the Absolut candy version, took form.
I wanted to form a series of product ads that was totally inappropriate for their target group. I already had the beer bottle and was a good idea into the next ad.
Being alcohol ads came quite natural as of my profession along with the fact that drugs and alcohol abuse among youth is a constant hot potato within todays society.
I redesigned the Tabasco/Absolut ad into a more kid-friendly ad. I used candy as a sort of a backbone to the project and words like "sweets" and "modern youngster" to really emphasize on the inappropriate. This, along with some graphics in lively colors and a recipe that would make any grown drinker's stomach to turn, made a really nice finished product. Imagine walking by a window with this ad posted on the inside while holding your 5-7 year old kid in your hand. I can almost guarantee that the kid would get stuck to the ground trying to get their parents to buy them one of these.
After the Starbrew and Absolut ads came the Toddlers Gold. The idea of this was to have a film commercial where two parents are sitting at a restaurant trying to talk to their friends while having a baby constantly screaming from the stroller beside them.
The parents give the baby a spoonful of Toddlers Gold and the baby goes to sleep.
Later on, after having finished the dinner, there would be a view of the parents and their dining company also having this fine whisky to round of their meal with.
A win win whisky! The fires added in the end is to match the color of the whisky itself and, as a lot of whisky-drinking people might already know, whisky (especially from the scottish highlands and Islay) tends to be quite fiery and well peated with smoky characteristics. The pacifier on the label was made in Illustrator and serves the purpose of showing who the product is meant for. Pacifiers are just as much of a treat for crying babies as it is for their parents tired ears!
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