OUGD504 - Concept Workshop

Today's workshop is to get us thinking about concepts, how far these can go and the different directions that it came take us. It is to help us get used to the idea of creating good concepts and making them strong and thought through, with good understanding and good follow through.
The brief is that we will be given words to work with and create a concept for either a hotel, restaurant or bar situated in Leeds.
We were put into groups to complete the workshop. Once in our groups we were presented with two jars, and instructed to take three pieces of papers from jar 1 and one piece from jar 2.

Jar 1 & Jar 2 picks

 From these we had to brain storm words associated to these three words to start coming up with a variety of potential concepts & ideas.

 Our initial agreement was that 'Curtain' was our least favourite and 'Court' seemed the best option. We came up with a variety of different angles relating to the words, and decided on doing either something to do with Time Travel/Futuristic or a Court of Law. There were multiple ways in these two ideas that we could interpret them and start creating strong concepts for.
Time Travel/Futuristic:
A long bar - each section of the bar a different century/time period with relating drinks/furniture & decor. Potentially going down the futuristic route with chrome/metal, a really clean & minimalist approach, a high end bar.
Court of Law:
A bar situated in an old courthouse, keeping the layout & furniture of it and designing a bar around it - potentially for young professionals/lawyers.
Audience is key and is what we spent most of the time discussing, deciding if we wanted to aim it at younger people/students or professionals. Taking into consideration the fact that the Leeds area already has a huge amount of bars that are heavily populated by students, and there aren't really a huge majority of high end bars, we decided on the audience of young professionals.
After further discussion and feedback from the tutors, we decided to push the concept further in the Court of Order direction, thinking about how we could put a clever twist on it. The idea of a prison theme came up and we decided to expand on this concept.

We were influenced by research we did into an old prison in the Netherlands which has been converted into a luxury hotel, Het Arresthuis. When converted all original interiors have been kept, with the whole thing just being modernised and updated. We found it very interesting and quite an innovative idea and the outcome is something we as a group admired.

The concept we created is a bar in an old prison, aimed at young professionals, and a sophisticated feel to the place. Interior-wise, we want to go with simple and clean design, sticking with black and white to go with the standard old-time prison colours. We will also keep all the interiors there already, building the bar around it and incorporating it as much as possible, keeping the original brickwork/doors/stairs.

Choosing a name is something that took us quite a while to do. We first came up with a list of words that were associated with prisons, such as Witness, Sentence & Banged Up. However as we wanted to keep the concept sophisticated and aimed at the young professionals market we had to have a name which doesn't make it sound like a student bar, so many of the names were thrown out.

The final three we were between were:

Sentence - like the sentence you're given when going to prison

Bars - like the old style jail cell bars

Contraband - the smuggling in of items into prison which are regarded as illegal or not allowed

After discussion we decided on Contraband because the whole concept is having a bar in a prison, and drinking alcohol in a prison is something which is illegal and classed as contraband.

Initial ideas for the logo were to incorporate the prison cell bars in some way. While drawn ideas were worked on, I created a few quick ones on Illustrator.

The problem we found using the bars as a background was legibility. Although it was our initial idea for how we wanted it to look, it didn't work as well as we'd hoped, and because of that, we decided to keep it very simple and just go with white text on a black box.

Chosen Logo

After this was decided we worked on the drinks and music side of things. We decided that as well as usual bar drinks, we'd have a few others which are specially tailored for our bar, all with names relating to the prison theme. 

As the bar is aimed at young professionals we wanted a mix of genres of music, but nothing that sounded too tacky, so went with more sophisticated music such as jazz etc. As well as this, and because the space we have is so large, the idea of having live music or events on is something we have also included.

Overall we worked quite well as a group and all were in agreement in the final concept. Although there were initial conflicts at the beginning, once we worked on this concept we all agreed it was the best one to take forward, and creating everything around this concept was enjoyable. 

Presentation