A little something I made for some friends-my diplomats. ^-^ In homage to Ken Taylor, really, whom, I ADORE. His work is amazing. So this is kind of a little love note to his beautiful style.

Illustrator!

So, it’s interesting that I sometimes forget to mention my involvement in what is Marble Pop-and so when it came up last week, I realized-oh, this is kind of something that is pretty big that I really was a part of from start to finish-so maybe I should kind of talk about it a bit.

A few years back (like 6), I worked for a company called Nishimoto. They are a Japanese company that specializes in manufacturing, importing and exporting japanese food items like this:

and this:

When I came on board, they wanted to do more to reach out to the American consumer-because their entire business is  formulated around specialty japanese food items for japanese food markets and some specialty american markets. So they wanted to try taking something that potentially had the most American appeal, their brand of Ramune:

And work on rebranding it for an American audience.

This was a pretty tall order for someone who thought she’d just be updating the company’s massive food catalog. A big part of what I had to do was research viability of the drink in the American market. This meant researching lots of food trends, comparing price points of similar products, checking competing products and their markets and of course, advertising avenues for marketing of the drink when it came out. When I asked my boss what his ultimate goal for the drink was, I think he said he wanted it to be in Target. Well-price point wise, Ramune, because it’s manufactured and then imported from Japan, it’s price point to make a profit on the store shelves is unfortunately higher than most of the competing beverages on the shelves in Target, and this includes sodas imported in from Mexico. So, we aimed for the specialty market.

To begin-we needed a name. My boss came up with Marble Pop-I thought it was awesome, we went with it. So then, we needed to design it. Luckily, the printing company that makes the Shirakiku labels in Japan could also co-print any new labels and packages at the same place and without a detrimental increase in cost as the Japanese ones. Kind of the luxury of being a gigantic food company. We came up with the identity and market that we wanted to target, then I got to work finding a design company for them. So my first experience design directing! It was kind of amazing-I interviewed design groups that designed packaging for companies like Coca-Cola, Kelloggs, and Kraft-and all of them wanted to take a crack at localizing a Japanese product. My boss and I picked a team, and then after a few rounds of design submissions, with revisions, we decided upon a look. And this is it:

Where can you find Marble Pop now? Well the top picture in this blog post is one I took at Bristol Farms in Westwood. You can also find it at Cost Plus World Market, and in specialty shops. And this is now…5 years later. It is still out there, and still available.

I often overlook this project because I didn’t directly design Marble Pop. But, in a way I did design it via direction. I picked this look from the multiple designs that were submitted, and I asked for the revisions for it to end up looking the way it does now. And the fact that it still exists on shelves now five years later, and I just finished working on a game for almost a year that only lived in the web world for 6 months, it’s funny the things that just take hold in this world. I’m proud of it, and I’m glad it exists, and since this was my main project at Nishimoto, it’s something I take as a remembrance of my time there, and the fact that I had a nice boss who entrusted a lot to me. Kind of a rare thing for the Head of Marketing at a Japanese company to do with a newbie designer, and I didn’t realize it until I worked a lot more with other companies.

And there we have it. ^-^

]]> 0 admin http://www.michellemauk.com http://www.michellemauk.com/blog/?p=684 2011-12-04T01:54:43Z 2011-12-04T01:54:43Z

For fun, I made 8-bit sprites out of the Stitched characters. I’ve been toying with the idea of making some 8-bit animations and I would loveeeee to make an 8-bit game. It just would be fun to do. (Of course everything is in theory). So, I wanted to see if I could make a few little 8-bit ones just for a fun little graphic design project this weekend.

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