I joined the Bagnet team in the middle of the process of creating the 2024 Holiday Collection, after a contracted illustrator had started concept sketches. These simple grayscale designs served as the foundation for the collection, and they were given to me by our CEO, Kelley, who provided initial notes emphasizing the need for more detail and depth. I was tasked with incorporating these changes and adding color to the designs.
In order to make Kelley's changes, I needed to approach each design differently. Some designs needed a completely new illustration, some designs just needed color, and some were completely nixed by Kelley after she saw the initial concept sketches from the illustrator. I worked on each in Procreate for iPad, drawing and adding color.
The colored illustrations were then scanned and vectorized in Adobe Illustrator. I spent considerable time perfecting each pixel and standardizing the colors to the palette I had chosen, setting us up for success when it came time to send to the printer further down the road.
After submitting the first colored iterations, Kelley provided positive feedback, particularly on the snowflakes and Xmas lights designs. The main focus for further revisions was refining the color palette to align with our brand colors. This happened in tandem with our larger rebranding project, so that these new styles aligned with the overall look and feel. This turned out to be extremely beneficial, as we purposefully picked an extensive palette to allow for more flexibility in the designs.
After the color palette was established, I reworked and recolored the designs to match. My hard work in the vectorization process had paid off, as the process in Adobe Illustrator was simple and took just a few clicks to swap colors. This did involve several iterations, testing different color combinations until we landed on the final look that Kelley felt most confident about selling to our customers.
With the final colors in place, the next step was preparing the styles for print production. This involved a round of strategic combining of colors to meet the 15-color printing limitation of our manufacturer. Each color was matched to a Pantone library equivalent, and a detailed document was created to label each use.
The files were sent to our manufacturer, and samples were produced. The samples turned out great, and Kelley approved them without changes. This led to a full production run, with the Bagnets scheduled to be available starting in October.
This detailed and iterative process ensured that our 2024 Holiday Bagnet Collection was not only visually stunning but also perfectly aligned with our brand's quality and aesthetic standards.
Team
Client: Bagnet
Founder and CEO: Kelley Daring
Director of Purchasing & Planning: Christina Lafferty
Customer Care Expert: Cami Macias
Creative Director: Rebecca Jones
Senior Graphic Designer, Copywriter: Liz White