When starting this brief, I decided I wasn't going to use any photography. Much of the existing advertising for Paco Rabanne relies on images of men, women, cars, money, and gambling, which automatically associates the brand with all these things. Everything that I planned on producing would include images and illustrations that I have designed and set up myself.
One element that I do like to their campaigns is the black, white and gold colour scheme, however I am not as keen on the way it is executed. My plan was to use the black and white imagery, using the gold to highlight important areas of the campaign.
I wanted to keep the poster designs classic, sophisticated and simple, allowing words and type to do the talking for it. The names of previous fragrances all coincide with the underlying theme of their advertising, hinting and wealth and luxurious lifestyles, and informing their audience that this is 'cool; Black XS, One Million and Lady Million.
For these posters I felt that it was important to be promoting a new fragrance, that would fit with this new campaign. I was keen for a play on words and so started looking for words to do with the concept of luxury and wealth that could be given a double meaning:
After looking into one word options for a name for a new fragrance, I found that words similar to 'treasure' and 'fortune' were along the right sort of lines of what I wanted to promote, something to be treasured over the sense of entitlement that the previous ads gave the brand.
I decided to use 'fortune' as the word can be mean several things in different contexts. This would also allow me to use the many phrases and sayings referring to 'fortune' which sends out a more positive message to it's audience:
- 'Fortune favours the brave.'
- 'Every man is the architect of his own fortune.'
- 'Worth a fortune.'
'Wise men turn chance to good fortune.'
- 'A great mind becomes a great fortune.'
'Fortune sides with he who dares.'
I want to use these quotes for the posters as they do not speak of fortune in the sense of money or wealth but in life and attitude to it.
For the kind of aesthetic I was going for I felt it was best to experiment with layout while I design them, as there are a few different elements to the design, and the type is quite minimal. I thought it would be difficult to work out what would work best without the background on the page and seeing it for myself in front of me.
I planned to use the same pattern as with the packaging, but more subtly, as a background and not a key element.
In the early stages of these designs it came to my attention that I was going to need to add something to the posters to let them speak and give the pattern the backseat. In another project I had made some ink compositions that I thought could also work in this context. So I made some more of these, simple bleeding ink around a page with varied intensities, and then scanned them in, photoshopping them to make them black and white:
I thought that these could modernise what was becoming a very 1920s art deco design, so I played around with how these two styles could interact with each other.
After trying out a few variations of this, I was really pleased with how the white pattern looked over the ink, and how the gold fell behind it. I used Optimus Princeps for the copy, as I felt it lent a sense of balance to the cross of modernity and art deco visuals, as well as partnering well with the logo.
I chose to work on a few of those combinations while incorporating some of the quotes I had gathered about fortune.
After trying just a few layout options it came to my attention that the letters were completely illegible when placed over the images, so I knew that each poster was going to have to have a sizeable white space to ensure viewers could read the copy.
