Design Practice

Today I met with a potential client for the What is good project, Anne Mansell, the owner of the Bees Knees Coffee house. Overall it was a really good experience, she introduced herself as a lovely down to earth woman, whom was very interested in what i had to say and offer. I began by talking about myself and the degree I was doing and moved onto talking about the project Ihad been working on and how I felt it could benefit a coffee type business. She seemed to be quite interested and like the ideas that I was playing on and thought that overhearing subject and the quotes were really interesting.

I asked about the business and how I never knew that the store was a flagship for catering and such. The place has changed several times from being a Art gallery to a restaurant and eventually leading to the coffee and delicacy shop sometimes with a mix of them in-between. Within the district of Morley the cafe had been designed to be more of a high profile business which reaches the sophisticated end of the market as oppose to local diners and sandwich bars. With more success in the catering business in the season of christmas and running side-line businesses Anne's priorities and work-load at the moment are massive, I was very appreciative of the fact she had taken the time out to talk to me. Unfortunately taking on a job of looking at the visuals and branding was not possible due to the mounting workload and inability to provide payments and such for visuals and menus etc, I was sympathetic, the phone did ring about four times whilst I was there. But I expressed that in-spite of this the project would still go ahead because it for my degree and client feedback on things I create would be fine, Sam from Essex who was working downstairs had created the menus and such for the cafe and Anne said if she wasn't available I could converse with her.

I learned a great deal about the business itself and what customers they attracted, this should help inform my design decisions later and I was able to get some sample menus and the new seasonal menu. They seemed to like the Window Graphics that I had produced and Sam gave me some idea about what could be done with the menu.

Overall quite productive and I'm moving onto doing some screen printing tomorrow for the coffee sleeves. I want to look more at costings as I didn't have a clear idea myself, if only justin was in to talk to. And also I thought I shouldn't just limit myself to this one cafe in Morley, I should see if there are any more locals that are interested in the design concept, but I am so pleased with the fact my work is seeming that bit more professional this should be a big boost in my portfolio.

Above are some of the previous designs for the menu and below the current seasonal menus which was recently developed.