OUGD603 EXTENDED PRACTICE: UK GREETINGS - INITIAL MIND MAP

When thinking about an initial concept for this brief, I started off by thinking about what kinds of cards I buy (birthday cards, Christmas cards, Valentines card, anniversary card, thank you cards), and which of those kind I struggle finding something appropriate (Valentines cards, anniversary cards, thank you cards). With cads relating to love being the most tricky to find group, I decided this could be a great gap in the market for cards that appeal to modern day couples, with relationships coming in so many different forms these days, and these being all the more widely accepted as well, I thought this is a great time to produce cards which accurately reflect modern day relationships.

I started off by creating a mind map of initial ideas for this modern love concept:

In this mind map I considered the target audience of the cards, and decided on 16-50 year old men and women, which is a very broad target audience, however this is because love isn't defined by age or gender, love is universal. I also thought of the cards appealing to the LGBTQ community and inter-racial couples too. But one of the main areas of the target audience will be contemporary people, people who aren't 'old fashioned', but yet can still be traditional, as the idea behind these cards is to represent modern times.
I also thought about the tone of voice for the designs, that is could be matter of fact, not cheesy/with puns as there are a lot of those types out there already, it should however still be friendly and slightly funny, but should equally not be serious, but informal.
I also thought about what kind of love cards I would be creating, and decided on anniversary cards, as Valentines designs are such a huge market already, with so many being around around Valentines itself, there's not much space for new designs as everything has already been done. However, I feel like anniversary cards get sidelined a little bit, as they are a year round event as personal as birthdays. Whenever I've tried to find an anniversary card for my boyfriend I always struggle as well, as nothing seems appropriate, or if it is then it'll be aimed at my "wife" or "husband" or "on your anniversary", so you have to scribble out the text and write your own on top. The past two years I've received fabulous cards which have both been adapted to suit the receiver (this year it was an awesome pug dressed up as Darth Vader addressed to "Husband" - the cashier thought my boyfriend was gay).  Because of my experience in this, I definitely feel like anniversary cards are a great event that needs a bit of a reboot to keep up with modern times.
I also went on to this about the actual aesthetics of the cards too, whether they'll be more abstract colours, or be a pattern and text type affair, or if they'll be character based, with the characters appearing across the range of cards and products in different scenarios. I'm really enjoying doing my character a day brief, and this is something I would like to incorporate into another brief, or at least incorporate characters in general, as this is something I have great fun doing and want to spread this passion across my work. These more aesthetic choices however will only be able to be able to be determined whether they work through actual experimentation, not mind mapping.

Moving forwards, the next stages will be to do some primary research into what cards are already out there in shops, to determine what the competition is and what the current theme is as well, and how I can improve upon it.